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Ginkgo BioworksC
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Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-08

Ginkgo Bioworks Q2 Earnings Call Highlights

MarketBeat
Interested in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Revenue fell sharply: Second-quarter 2026 revenue declined 48% year over year to $20 million, while net loss widened to $57 million and cash burn increased to $45 million. Ginkgo reaffirmed full-year cash-burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million. Autonomous labs remain the strategic focus: Ginkgo expanded its Boston Nebula facility to 105 racks and is pursuing projects with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, MIT, Caltech, the University of Maryland and Northwestern University. New service offerings target lower-cost drug research: The company launched ADME-One through its Datapoints platform, offering five drug-discovery assays for $199 per panel, and plans to expand its automated chemistry capabilities. Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $20 million, down 48% from the year-earlier period, as the company continued to shift its focus toward autonomous laboratory systems, contract research services and related software. Chief Executive Officer Jason Kelly said the company’s priorities for 2026 remain investing in autonomous labs, expanding its Nebula autonomous laboratory in Boston, and pursuing new sales to biopharma companies, national laboratories and research universities. → Meta’s Earnings Drop Shows Wall Street Wants More Than Ad Growth The company also reaffirmed its full-year cash-burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million. Ginkgo ended the quarter with $302 million in cash and cash equivalents, along with $87 million of restricted cash designated for certain customers and operating activities, Kelly said. Chief Financial Officer Steve Coen said Ginkgo’s former Biosecurity business, which was divested in a transaction completed April 3, is classified as discontinued operations. Financial commentary for the quarter relates exclusively to continuing operations, which the company now reports as one segment. → Sandisk Just Delivered a Blowout Quarter—Here's Why the Stock Is Falling Revenue totaled $40 million for the first six months of 2026, a 49% decline from the prior-year period. Coen noted that the first half of 2025 included $7.5 million of non-cash revenue related to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding that amount, first-half revenue declined about 42% year over year. Research and development expense…Read full document

Interested in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Revenue fell sharply: Second-quarter 2026 revenue declined 48% year over year to $20 million, while net loss widened to $57 million and cash burn increased to $45 million. Ginkgo reaffirmed full-year cash-burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million. Autonomous labs remain the strategic focus: Ginkgo expanded its Boston Nebula facility to 105 racks and is pursuing projects with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, MIT, Caltech, the University of Maryland and Northwestern University. New service offerings target lower-cost drug research: The company launched ADME-One through its Datapoints platform, offering five drug-discovery assays for $199 per panel, and plans to expand its automated chemistry capabilities. Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $20 million, down 48% from the year-earlier period, as the company continued to shift its focus toward autonomous laboratory systems, contract research services and related software. Chief Executive Officer Jason Kelly said the company’s priorities for 2026 remain investing in autonomous labs, expanding its Nebula autonomous laboratory in Boston, and pursuing new sales to biopharma companies, national laboratories and research universities. → Meta’s Earnings Drop Shows Wall Street Wants More Than Ad Growth The company also reaffirmed its full-year cash-burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million. Ginkgo ended the quarter with $302 million in cash and cash equivalents, along with $87 million of restricted cash designated for certain customers and operating activities, Kelly said. Chief Financial Officer Steve Coen said Ginkgo’s former Biosecurity business, which was divested in a transaction completed April 3, is classified as discontinued operations. Financial commentary for the quarter relates exclusively to continuing operations, which the company now reports as one segment. → Sandisk Just Delivered a Blowout Quarter—Here's Why the Stock Is Falling Revenue totaled $40 million for the first six months of 2026, a 49% decline from the prior-year period. Coen noted that the first half of 2025 included $7.5 million of non-cash revenue related to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding that amount, first-half revenue declined about 42% year over year. Research and development expense was $30 million, down 4% from $31 million a year earlier. General and administrative expense was $12 million, down 26% from $16 million in the prior-year quarter. Net loss from continuing operations was $57 million, compared with a $53 million loss a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $36 million, compared with negative $25 million in the second quarter of 2025. Second-quarter cash burn was $45 million, compared with $38 million a year earlier. For the first half of 2026, cash burn was $93 million, down 3% from $96 million in the prior-year period. Coen said first-quarter cash burn included a $14 million payment to Google Cloud related to an amended 2025 commitment. The revised arrangement reduced future minimum commitments by more than $100 million and extended the commitment term to six years from three years, he said. → 4 Oil and Gas ETF Plays as Prices Stay Sky-High Adjusted EBITDA included $14 million in costs associated with excess leased space during the second quarter, up from $12 million a year earlier. Coen said those expenses consist of rent and related charges on unoccupied space, net of sublease income, and could potentially be reduced through additional subleasing. Ginkgo raised $17 million through its at-the-market equity program during the quarter. The company excludes those proceeds from its cash-burn calculation. Kelly said Ginkgo expanded Nebula, its Boston autonomous lab, to 105 racks after adding roughly 50 racks during the quarter. He said the expansion was installed and operating within approximately three weeks after the racks had been manufactured. The system uses a track-and-robotic-arm configuration to move samples among laboratory devices. According to Kelly, Nebula operates continuously and on an average day can run about 30 unique protocols submitted by scientists, with more than 100 protocol copies across the system’s devices. Kelly said Ginkgo is working to move a majority of its internal laboratory work to Nebula over time. The company expects the system to improve the economics of its service offerings while serving as a demonstration platform for prospective autonomous-lab customers. He contrasted the company’s autonomous-lab approach with more conventional laboratory work cells, which can automate repeated tasks but generally lack flexibility for new experimental protocols. Kelly said Ginkgo is seeking to combine the continuous operation of automated systems with the flexibility of manual laboratory benches. Ginkgo said it is building an autonomous laboratory system for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Kelly said the company had previously installed the first 13 racks at the Department of Energy laboratory and expects the project to expand to a 97-rack system. The company also said it was selected to build autonomous labs for MIT, Caltech, the University of Maryland and Northwestern University. Kelly said the Caltech, Maryland and Northwestern projects are part of a National Science Foundation program, while MIT’s project is funded through a separate grant. Coen said revenue from large automation projects is generally recognized when equipment is delivered and installation is completed. He said the national laboratory project has generated some preliminary-contract revenue, but revenue from the larger installation will be recognized upon delivery and completion of installation. In addition to equipment revenue, Coen said autonomous-lab contracts can include support, maintenance, custom work and software licensing revenue that may continue after installation. Ginkgo also highlighted its Datapoints contract research offerings, including a recently launched service called ADME-One. The service provides a panel of five assays used to assess absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion properties of small-molecule drug candidates. Kelly said Ginkgo is offering the service for $199 per panel, compared with prices he cited of $2,000 to $5,000 from Western contract research organizations and $1,000 to $2,500 from Chinese providers. The offering includes partnerships with Inductive Bio for pharmacokinetic projections and Tangible Scientific for compound management, he said. The company said it has conducted internal quality-control testing and comparisons with external vendors for the assays. Kelly also said Ginkgo plans to add plate-based chemistry, chemical purification and inert-atmosphere chemistry capabilities to its automated operations. Coen said Datapoints revenue is recognized over time, similar to Ginkgo’s legacy services business. He said Datapoints projects are generally smaller than historical projects and typically run from three to nine months, though some can extend longer. Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc is a synthetic biology company that designs custom microbes for customers across a range of industries. Utilizing a proprietary organism foundry platform, the company engineers cells to produce high-value chemicals, enzymes, and other biological materials. By integrating automation, data analytics and machine learning, Ginkgo Bioworks seeks to accelerate the development of biologically derived solutions at industrial scale. The company's services span the entire development cycle, from genetic design and strain optimization to fermentation and downstream processing. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. The article "Ginkgo Bioworks Q2 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for August 2026.

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-07

Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary

Moby
Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Management is positioning autonomous labs as a critical imperative for U.S. scientific competitiveness, specifically to counter the trend of drug discovery work being offshored to China. The company is transitioning its core technology focus toward 'Nebula,' its large-scale autonomous lab in Boston, which recently doubled in size to 105 robotic racks. Performance attribution for the quarter reflects a significant revenue decline, which management attributes to the divestiture of the biosecurity segment and the conclusion of legacy service agreements. Operational efficiency is being driven by the 'productization' of lab hardware through standardized rack carts, allowing for rapid system expansion and debugging compared to traditional custom automation. Strategic positioning now emphasizes a 'Waymo-style' approach to biology, aiming for high automation combined with the flexibility of a manual lab bench to capture the 95% of research spending currently done by hand. Management argues that automating the lab bench will not replace scientists but will instead expand the market for biological computation, similar to the historical impact of mechanical calculators on engineering. Full-year 2026 cash burn guidance is reaffirmed at $125 million to $150 million, reflecting a balance between restructuring savings and new investments in AI and robotics. Revenue recognition for the new automation segment will be lumpy, with hardware revenue recognized upon delivery and installation, followed by long-tail recurring revenue from SaaS licensing and maintenance. The company expects to scale its 'ADME-One' service to compete directly with offshore CROs by offering standardized biological assays at approximately one-tenth the price of traditional vendors. Future technical milestones include bringing plate-based chemistry and anaerobic environments into the autonomous lab framework to support chemical synthesis and small molecule drug discovery. Management anticipates a 'FOMO' effect among research universities following the initial NSF-funded autonomous lab deployments, potentially driving a paradigm shift in academic research infrastructure. The divestiture of the biosecurity business has resulted in its classification as di…Read full document

Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Management is positioning autonomous labs as a critical imperative for U.S. scientific competitiveness, specifically to counter the trend of drug discovery work being offshored to China. The company is transitioning its core technology focus toward 'Nebula,' its large-scale autonomous lab in Boston, which recently doubled in size to 105 robotic racks. Performance attribution for the quarter reflects a significant revenue decline, which management attributes to the divestiture of the biosecurity segment and the conclusion of legacy service agreements. Operational efficiency is being driven by the 'productization' of lab hardware through standardized rack carts, allowing for rapid system expansion and debugging compared to traditional custom automation. Strategic positioning now emphasizes a 'Waymo-style' approach to biology, aiming for high automation combined with the flexibility of a manual lab bench to capture the 95% of research spending currently done by hand. Management argues that automating the lab bench will not replace scientists but will instead expand the market for biological computation, similar to the historical impact of mechanical calculators on engineering. Full-year 2026 cash burn guidance is reaffirmed at $125 million to $150 million, reflecting a balance between restructuring savings and new investments in AI and robotics. Revenue recognition for the new automation segment will be lumpy, with hardware revenue recognized upon delivery and installation, followed by long-tail recurring revenue from SaaS licensing and maintenance. The company expects to scale its 'ADME-One' service to compete directly with offshore CROs by offering standardized biological assays at approximately one-tenth the price of traditional vendors. Future technical milestones include bringing plate-based chemistry and anaerobic environments into the autonomous lab framework to support chemical synthesis and small molecule drug discovery. Management anticipates a 'FOMO' effect among research universities following the initial NSF-funded autonomous lab deployments, potentially driving a paradigm shift in academic research infrastructure. The divestiture of the biosecurity business has resulted in its classification as discontinued operations, requiring a retrospective recast of all prior financial periods. A $14 million payment was made to Google Cloud in Q1 2026 to reset future minimum commitments, reducing total future obligations by over $100 million and extending the term to six years. Adjusted EBITDA continues to be impacted by 'excess lease space' carrying costs, totaling $14 million in Q2, representing unoccupied facilities that management is attempting to mitigate through subleasing. The company raised $17 million through an at-the-market equity program during the second quarter, which is excluded from the reported cash burn figures. One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. Tap here. Management clarified that automation hardware revenue is recognized at a point in time upon delivery and installation, while Datapoints revenue follows a services model recognized over time. The large PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Lab) project is currently in the planning phase, with the bulk of revenue expected only after equipment installation is complete. Management declined to provide specific repeat rates but noted that deals typically start as proof-of-concepts followed by expanded recurring work. The new ADME service has secured 16 customers in its first six weeks, many of whom are new logos for the company, indicating a shift toward high-volume, conveyor-belt style demand. The four new university labs (MIT, Caltech, Maryland, Northwestern) serve as disparate use cases—from protein engineering to education—to prove the platform's flexibility. Management believes these labs will train the next generation of scientists to work on robotics rather than manual benches, creating long-term structural demand for autonomous infrastructure.

TranscriptFY2026 Q22026-08-05

FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript

Earnings source - 72 paragraphs
Daniel Marshall

I'm Daniel Marshall, Senior Manager of Communications and Ownership. I'm joined by Jason Kelly, our Co-founder and CEO, and Steve Coen, our CFO. Thanks as always for joining us. We're looking forward to updating you on our progress. As a reminder, during the presentation today, we will be making forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our filings with the SEC to learn more about these risks and uncertainties, including our most recent 10-K. Today, in addition to updating you on the quarter results, we're going to make the argument that autonomous labs are an imperative for American science. We're also going to provide insight into how we are going to scale the capabilities of Nebula, our autonomous lab in Boston, and share an update on how we are getting autonomous labs like Nebula into the hands of the next generation of scientists.

Daniel Marshall

As usual, we'll end with a Q&A session. I'll take questions from analysts, investors, and the public. You can submit those questions to us in advance via X, #ginkgoresults or email [email protected]. All right. Over to you, Jason.

Jason Kelly

Thanks, Daniel. We always start with our mission here, which is to make biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo. In 2026, our goals remain the same. We want to focus and invest to win in this new category of autonomous labs. We want to focus Ginkgo's efforts really on the technology side, largely into autonomous labs. We're going to invest to extend our lead there. Second, we want to demonstrate the capabilities of an autonomous lab by using our big system here in Boston, Nebula, which I'll talk about today, that we, in the last quarter, expanded that substantially, so that we can sort of move the majority of our work onto that system over the course of the year and into the future.

Jason Kelly

That's a great chance to both improve the economics of our services and also demonstrate to other potential buyers of autonomous labs just what you can do with a system like this. So I want to talk a bit about that today as well. Finally, want to book new sales of autonomous labs in biopharma, national labs, and as I'll mention today, research universities, which we're very excited about. We have made a lot of headway, as you know, and we've been talking about for a couple of years now on improving our cash burn. You can see that in the second half of this year, we intend to improve on that burn even further than we did in the first half of the year. That is really work we've been doing in the first half of the year, sort of paying off and bearing fruit.

Jason Kelly

Really excited. This gives us this plus our $302 million in cash and cash equivalents, as well as we have an additional $87 million that we've set aside for restricted cash for various customers and certain operating activities. Puts us in a really nice spot going into the second half of this year and the future to really have the capital we need to continue this growth into autonomous labs. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Steve in order to dig into the financials. You'll hear from me again in the strategic session. Thank you.

Steve Coen

Thanks, Jason. Before I walk through our financials, I want to remind everyone that following the previously announced transaction that closed on April 3rd, the divestiture of Biosecurity is classified as discontinued operations within our financial statements. Accordingly, we have and will retrospectively recast all prior periods presented to conform to this presentation. The former Biosecurity results are now reported as loss from discontinued operations below loss from continuing operations. All of our financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations where we now operate as a single segment. With that, I'll now discuss our Q2 results. Revenue was $20 million in the second quarter of 2026, down 48% compared to the second quarter of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, revenue was $40 million, down 49% compared to the same period last year.

Steve Coen

As previously disclosed, revenue in the first six months of 2025 included $7.5 million in non-cash revenue relating to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding this, revenue for the first six months of 2026 was down approximately 42% from the prior year period. It is important to note that our net loss includes a number of non-cash and other non-recurring items, as detailed more fully in our financial statements. Because of these non-cash and other non-recurring items, we believe adjusted EBITDA is a more indicative measure of our profitability. A full reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and GAAP net loss from continuing operations can be found in the appendix. In the second quarter of 2026, R&D expense decreased 4% from $31 million in the second quarter of 2025 to $30 million in the second quarter of 2026.

Steve Coen

G&A expense decreased 26% from $16 million in the second quarter of 2025 to $12 million in the second quarter of 2026. These decreases were primarily driven by our restructuring efforts, which was substantially concluded at the end of 2025. Net loss from continuing operations was $57 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to a loss of $53 million in the prior year period. Moving further down the page, you'll note that adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter of 2026 was negative $36 million, compared to negative $25 million in the second quarter of 2025.

Steve Coen

It is important to note that adjusted EBITDA includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which you can see was $14 million in the second quarter of 2026, up from $12 million in the prior year period. This cost represents the base rent and other charges relating to leased space which we are not occupying, net of sublease income. This is a cash operating cost that is not related to driving revenue right now and can be potentially mitigated through subleasing. Finally, cash burn in the second quarter of 2026 was $45 million, compared to $38 million in the second quarter of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, cash burn was $93 million, down from $96 million in the same period last year. A 3% decrease.

Steve Coen

As previously reported, we paid Google Cloud $14 million in the first quarter of this year relating to the 2025 amended commitment, which increased our cash burn for the period. Resetting the commitment reduced our future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms and extended the commitment term from three to six years. Excluding this payment, cash burn reflects a significant decrease in the first half of 2026 compared to the first half of 2025, which was a direct result of the restructure. During the second quarter, we raised $17 million through our at the market equity program. Consistent with our methodology, these related proceeds are excluded from cash burn for all periods presented. Turning to guidance.

Steve Coen

As we discussed earlier this year, 2026 is about continuing to be cost efficient while investing in our AI robotics and software to bring autonomous labs to our bioscience customers, including the build-out of our frontier autonomous lab in Boston. We have turned the page from focusing on restructuring actions to focus this year not only on cost efficiency, but on investing in what we see as our opportunities while continuing to provide our customers the advanced services they have come to expect. For these reasons, we believe cash burn best reflects our continuing services and tools and further investments in autonomous labs. In terms of outlook for the full year, we are reaffirming our overall cash burn guidance for 2026 totaling $125 million-$150 million. This range reflects a firm balance amongst cost efficiency, continuing services and tools, and further investments we are making.

Steve Coen

In conclusion, we are pleased with the continued improvements in cash burn efficiency and our business pursuits for 2026. With that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jason.

Jason Kelly

Thanks, Steve. As I said, Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. We're going to have three strategic topics today to dig in on. First, there's been a lot of activity in U.S. science, a new report coming out of Office of Science and Technology Policy I'm going to touch on. Autonomous labs are becoming a real imperative for the U.S. to stay competitive in science and particularly in biotechnology versus China. I'm going to speak to that. Second, Nebula, our large autonomous lab here in Boston, is the largest in the world. It's growing rapidly. I want to showcase what we've been doing with it. Finally, we are using that lab and all our infrastructure here at Ginkgo to offer up competing services to offshore CROs that are quite economically competitive for customers, and I want to highlight one of those in particular.

Jason Kelly

All right. Let's dig in on the autonomous labs. There's been a lot of news in the last quarter, in particular, an article coming out in "Stat" magazine that featured Ginkgo quite heavily about this question within the biotech industry of should we be offshoring our work to China for the discovery of drugs? Is that a concern in a world where there's increasing geopolitical tensions between the two countries? Ginkgo was featured around how our automation could be a counterweight to lower cost labor in China.

Jason Kelly

This is a hot topic, and the reason it is highlighted in that "The Wall Street Journal" article, where you've seen the number of newly acquired drug assets, in other words, drugs bought from startup biotech companies, go from almost none coming from Chinese startups about five years ago to last year it was 48%, and the first quarter of this year it was more than 50%. That's obviously borne out in our jobs ecosystem and our technology ecosystem. This is a post in Reddit on the biotech forum. "I'm an extremely frustrated bench scientist having no luck finding work in six months after layoff. I did get an interesting suggestion of one biopharma startup CEO told me he doesn't hire for any bench work in the U.S., outsources it all to China.

Jason Kelly

He said, 'Have you considered working in China?'" This person says, "Is that a good idea considering I only speak English?" I don't think that's a great idea. I don't think our scientists should be moving to China in search of biotech jobs. I think the U.S. needs to become competitive with China, and the way we're going to do that is we're going to automate the laboratory work at the lab bench. You're seeing a lot of energy around this. There's an absolutely great report out of the Office of Science and Technology Policy from Director Mike Kratsios there highlighting the new strategy for science in the United States. This is partially under the umbrella of the Genesis Mission, which I'll talk about, to bring AI into science, but also highlights NSF's new program to spend $400 million on a national network of cloud laboratories.

Jason Kelly

If you look in the document, you'll see this section on autonomous experimentation. Closed-loop autonomous laboratories can collapse discovery timelines by orders of magnitude and enable science at a truly industrial scale. Focused investments in robotics and automated laboratories, leveraging industry demand and federal R&D to ensure our scientific equipment industrial base is built on the world's best hardware and software and leads the charge in the coming scientific revolution. This is awesome. It's really great to see a call to action like this out of the OSTP. It's exactly what they should be doing. If you see here on this next slide, Ginkgo's been building the first autonomous lab for a national lab here in the U.S. I had the chance to ribbon cut the first 13 of our racks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with the Secretary of Energy, Secretary Wright, in December.

Jason Kelly

On the right-hand side, you can actually see all the expanded 97 rack system that we'll be building a schematic of that this is going to be expanded into coming up under the Genesis Mission. Really excited to be a part of that. Very excited to announce just yesterday that we had been selected to build autonomous labs for MIT, Caltech, Maryland, and Northwestern. Caltech, Maryland, and Northwestern as part of this NSF program, and MIT through a separate grant. This is really exciting because we're getting autonomous labs in the hands of graduate students, people with my sort of training, so that they're learning how to do science on top of robotics, rather than how I was taught, which was sort of slaving away at a lab bench doing experiments by hand.

Jason Kelly

We have to think about the practice of how we do this work alongside the underlying technology of robotics so that they develop together. I think this program is super important. I think it's a big part of how the U.S. stays competitive. I'm quite proud we're a part of it. I want to, again, I'm going to highlight a few slides I showed last time, but I think it's an important point to make. When I say autonomous lab, what do we even mean by that? I'll draw an analogy to the transportation industry. On the Y-axis of this chart is sort of the amount of automation of a given transportation technology, and on the X-axis is the flexibility of a request from a user of that automation that the technology will allow.

Jason Kelly

Low amount of flexibility, high amount of automation, top left, that's a subway. That's our Red Line T here in Boston. It's totally automated. You sit down, it takes you away, but you better want to go to one of the stops on the subway. It's not going to pull up in front of your house. Low amount of automation, a high amount of flexibility is a car. You put your hands on the wheel, your foot on the pedals, and you can go straight to your house or the grocery store, go wherever you want. It's highly flexible, but you have a human in the loop to manage the variability. That's the transportation system for the last 100 years. Unless you've been in a Waymo, which is what we call an autonomous car.

Jason Kelly

You'll notice we don't call it an automated car because automated sounds like automated door or something. It's just doing the same thing over and over again. An autonomous car magically goes wherever you ask it to go without a human in the loop. Here's the kicker. If you look at miles traveled in the U.S., subways versus cars and trucks, it's 99% cars and trucks because you need the flexibility. It's not like we don't know about railroads and tracks, it's that people need to go where they need to go in their lives. That's why this is such a disruptive thing coming with Waymos, is they're going to go after the 99%. It's going to automate the overwhelming majority of the transportation ecosystem, which is what subways never got to. Here's what it looks like in the lab.

Jason Kelly

Low amount of flexibility, high amount of automation. We actually have our subways. They're called work cells. They're used for things like high throughput screening in pharma companies or for running diagnostic tests at a clinical lab where you've got the same experiment being run over and over again. They're wonderful because they're fully automated. You can walk away, you can run them 24/7. You don't need a person in the middle. They are not flexible. You cannot read a new experiment in a paper and then have it running on your work cell tomorrow. Low amount of automation, a high amount of flexibility. This is that car, right? It can do whatever you want, but you have to have a human in the loop. This is the lab bench and the manual laboratory. All right?

Jason Kelly

Again, much like cars and transportation, the bench is 95%+ of the $60 billion-$80 billion a year that pharma companies spend on research, not clinical trials, but their research labs. The $40 billion a year that the NIH spends on doing research laboratory work. All that money is going towards the benches, and almost none of it today is going to robotics because, not because we don't know about robots, but because the robotics systems so far have not been flexible enough to do science and to do drug discovery. That's what we're trying to build at Ginkgo. We're trying to make our version of a Waymo, that top right corner. It should have the automation of the work cells. You should be able to walk away and run it 24/7, but the flexibility of the lab bench.

Jason Kelly

That's a much bigger prize than the work cell prize, but a much harder technical challenge. The ROI for an autonomous lab is quite clear. If you compare it to our manual labs at Ginkgo, of which we have plenty, you can see some very obvious differences. For starters, you cram the same amount of equipment that you would have spread out around a manual lab with humans moving through it into about a third of the space. It's much smaller. Additionally, our lab is running 24/7. Nebula, the autonomous lab, is running 24/7. If you haven't done the math on a week, a work week for a lab technician is like 40 hours, and there's 168 hours in a week. You're getting a four-fold increase in the hours that that big sunk cost laboratory is being used.

Jason Kelly

Finally, repeatability, traceability, electronic records are all just right inside of an autonomous lab without even having to work for it. AI-driven science is going to need these things. I think it's going to be hard to connect that into the manual lab infrastructure. The way that we're going to do that is through robotic labs. It's intrinsic to those systems. All right. I get asked a lot, and I started this off with a bench scientist worried about a job, are autonomous labs going to exacerbate the problem of scientists having a hard time getting jobs in the U.S.? I don't think so. This is our advertisement from IBM back in 1952. I love this ad. It says, "Hey, here's the IBM mechanical calculator." This actually predated the computer. It can do the work of 150 extra engineers.

Jason Kelly

There they are, these engineers with their slide rules, right? This was the era before computation had been automated. You might have said, "Oh, well, this machine over here will of course replace these 150 gentlemen with their slide rules." That is not at all what happened. In fact, we had an enormous explosion in the number of engineering jobs. The reason was the actual limiter on the market size for computation was the fact that we were doing it manually. Once we automated computation, it turned out there was a vastly bigger market for computation than we thought there was. That what was really valuable was what was in those engineers' heads, their knowledge of practice in computation, their knowledge of the problems you want to solve with computation.

Jason Kelly

Once you could get a much better ROI on that through the automation of computation with computers, that field exploded. That's really what I see as the opportunity for us in biotechnology. We're being limited by our manual labs. Our scientists' jobs are limited by the manual labs. Manual science jobs, in particular, are being offshored as fast as possible. The way to stop that is with laboratory automation. Okay. Let's talk about an actual existing autonomous lab that we have here in Boston. I love this video. Nebula is the name for our autonomous lab here in the Seaport. We have now 105 racks on it. It really is huge and awesome to see in person.

Jason Kelly

If you remember how this works, we have a track system that's moving samples from device to device on the system. The arms pick up the samples, put it onto that particular device. That device does whatever particular step in the lab protocol is asked for by the scientist that submitted the job. One thing I'll highlight is we actually roughly doubled the size of the system. We added 50 new racks, basically over a three-week period, right? We had built the racks in advance in manufacturing. Just to put them in, connect up all the hardware, do a cycle of debugging on things that broke on the software when we expanded to be that big, we had it up and running doing experiments about three weeks later. That, in the world of subway work cell automation, is just crazy.

Jason Kelly

Building a new automation system with 50 new devices on it and having it up and running over three weeks is just not a thing that happens. I do think we're really benefiting from the fact that we've productized, through our rack carts, what has up till now been a custom process of integrating devices in an autonomous lab. We now, like I said, have 105 racks. This is running day and night. I'll just point out, an average-ish day would be 30 unique protocols coming from scientists. More than 100 if you count copies of protocols running across those 100 devices. I don't think there's anything else like this running in the world today, where new experiments are submitted by scientists, not automation engineers, but scientists every day onto the system, and the system just handles that variability and manages it.

Jason Kelly

This is that Waymo phenomena, being able to handle the variability at scale is pretty crazy. It's not like we don't have bugs, not like we don't have issues to work through. We do. Just even being able to do that is pretty nuts at this point. It's running 24/7. There's a picture of our scheduler. The colors are different protocols. X-axis is time, Y-axis is all the different racks on the system. You can see how we have to sort of jigsaw puzzle in different protocols. If you submitted a new job to the system, it would check to see, is the device you need available in the times that you need it, and could you fit your particular set of protocols into this jigsaw puzzle? If so, you would get to go in.

Jason Kelly

A lot of the work we're doing is on improving the scheduler and improving robustness of the system and all kinds of really interesting stuff. It's very much engineering work to continue to drive up the variability that scientists can put on the system, as well as increase the total number of protocols we can run at any given time. Really exciting engineering work. You should come take a tour of Nebula. We've had a lot of people come through now. Many hundreds of people in the first half of this year. There's lots of really fun videos on Instagram and TikTok and everywhere else. It's a neat system to see in person. We do tours three days a week. Anyone's welcome to sign up for it. Please do. We really love to have people come by and see it.

Jason Kelly

If you're sort of a pharma company or even an academic scientist, or someone who has a particular protocol that you really would get value from automating, but you've never automated it before, if we have the same equipment that you use in your manual lab, we're happy to try your protocol on Nebula. We would just have one of our scientists submit it as their protocol that day, and we would see how well it would work. You can kind of do this sort of try before you buy on integrated automation. That's, again, not a thing that happens with the subways.

Jason Kelly

They're sort of built, you test them with water, then you ship it over and cross your fingers. The customer kind of hopes that what the vendor showed works with clear, with water runs, ends up playing out in practice with biological runs once they get it in-house, and it's their job to debug it if not. We're able to bring that sort of debugging work earlier in the process. If that's of interest to you as a buyer of automation, we're finding people really like that. Okay. Lastly, we are using our autonomous lab. One way we do business is you could buy it. The other way we do business is we run our labs as a service, as a CRO, contract research organization. Increasingly, we've always done that for sort of very high-end, specialized services at Ginkgo, most notably our solutions business.

Jason Kelly

We have these large projects with Bayer or Novo Nordisk, where we're doing multi-year research projects using our infrastructure. That's not what I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm going to talk to you today about going straight at the traditional CRO work that pharma companies have been offshoring to scientists in China, companies like WuXi, for over the last 20-25 years. Once you have a lab that doesn't have people in it, we really think we can compete on a cost basis very well with those offshore CROs. This is not unique to bio. There's a company I really like, it's called SendCutSend, where you can, I don't know if anybody has done this, you can order sort of custom sheet metal fabrication.

Jason Kelly

This is, again, back to that graph I drew of throughput and our automation level and variability. This is custom sheet metal fabrication, which means we basically offshored it because it was a labor-intensive custom process to cut this in the particular way that a customer would want them to cut it to. We lost this industry over the last 50 years. It's really exciting to see this coming back via SendCutSend, that's through a mix of some automation, but also through really smart software to turn customer requests into smart geometries of how they're doing it and basically use technology to bring costs back in line with what you would've got by offshoring the old generation of approaches to lower-cost labor overseas. I think this is how the U.S. is going to bring back the world of atoms, right?

Jason Kelly

We should not just be a country that only does information technology and services. We should also be able to build things. In order to do that, we need to rethink the way that we work with atoms. That's the only way I think you bring atoms back, versus lower-cost manual labor. We're coming after that when it comes to these CROs, these contract research organizations, most notably WuXi, has really been sort of the centerpiece of offshoring, starting with chemistry, then increasingly biotech CRO services over the last 20-30 years. We launched a service now about six weeks ago called ADME-One. ADME stands for absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.

Jason Kelly

This is sort of a standard panel of, in this case, five tier one assays that are run on small molecules, so chemical drug candidates, to see how good they are on these sort of, not drug properties specific to your disease, but just these general drug properties about how your body processes the small molecule. To give you a sense, you can buy these. These are very standard assays. You can get them from Western CRO vendors for $2,000-$5,000 for the panel, or from Chinese CRO vendors for $1,000-$2,500 for the panel. You can get them from Ginkgo Datapoints for $199. That's not just the assays. We've also partnered up with Inductive Bio and Tangible Scientific to handle both a PK projection as well as compound management for your small molecules.

Jason Kelly

You're getting sort of the whole kit and caboodle here for close to a tenth the price. We've done a lot of work to validate these assays. I'll just flip through a few slides, but you can also go check this out on our website, both internal QC as well as, very importantly, we've compared two external vendors. We had the same sample go get tested by this ADME panel at external vendors and compared it to what we were seeing with our robotic automated approaches to doing ADME. We've seen really great results. I'll just flip through a few of these. On kinetic solubility on the left, you can see how we rank. This is like Spearman coefficient, how well do we put the molecules in the same order that our industry peer would on this particular assay.

Jason Kelly

As well as this binning, low, medium, high, and we have good agreement there for kinetic solubility. For permeability, again, same set of assays. For microsomal stability in human microsomes, same set of assays. P450 inhibition and plasma protein binding. We have done this also for a very popular small molecule library called LOPAC, 320 different compounds. We went ahead and tested all those across three of our tier one assays and put that data set up on the web. You can download that, and then you can use that to compare to the literature. Since this is up online, it means other people have been able to go download it and check it out.

Jason Kelly

There's a company called Inflexa that did a bunch of work with this data set, they published the platform's technically clean and talked about our replicates and assay controls and so on. We really encourage folks to check it out themselves. We think we stand up very well to WuXi in terms of technical capability and throughput, we kick their butt on price. I don't know why you couldn't use us. What's coming soon, this is another thing WuXi does well, which is chemical synthesis, so being able to build the molecules in addition to test the molecules. ADME is about testing. We'll bring online plate-based chemistry. We already actually do a lot of chemical purification historically at Ginkgo because of all our work in natural products. We're really just bringing that into an automated environment.

Jason Kelly

Finally, we want to have inert atmospheres, in other words, anaerobic chambers to do chemistry in. Here we're fortunate because the first system we delivered to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with our racks in it that I mentioned earlier with the Secretary of Energy, that was actually an anaerobic system. We've already had a lot of experience getting our robots into an anaerobic environment. We're going to be doing that, but pointing it towards doing chemistry. If you wanted to sort of beta test that with us, give me a call if you're interested in sort of the chemistry half of things. This is a natural complement to the biological assays we've developed at Ginkgo over the years.

Jason Kelly

A lot of times in drug discovery, you're either making a chemical or you're making a protein drug, but depending on the disease you're going into, they're both funneling into a similar set of biological assays about either that disease area or whatnot. We already have a lot of those assays running at high throughput on our automation, so adding chemistry is a really natural match for us, and it's a bigger fraction of the CRO business today in China. If you want to learn more about any of this, you can go to datapoints.ginkgo.bio. There's a banner at the top, and you can check out our ADME-One service. Okay. I want to end, just as a reminder, you can buy an autonomous lab from us.

Jason Kelly

If you really like this or you even like the types of assays we're doing, many customers might want to run their ADME internally, right? Maybe you want to build a service. Whatever it might be, we're happy to sell an autonomous lab to anyone that wants to use it to offer whatever types of products and services they want to develop. If you want to get experience trying one out, please try our lab services, and do consider reshoring your work if you're concerned about this offshoring trend. We want to keep adding more and more of the services you're currently getting from offshore CROs to our offerings in Datapoints and Ginkgo Cloud Lab. Okay. Let's grow the world we want to see. My email's up there. Always happy to get emails from folks if you have more questions, and happy to do Q&A.

Daniel Marshall

Thanks, Jason. As usual, I'll start with a question from the public and remind the analysts on the line that if you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hands on Zoom, and I'll call on you and open up your line. Thanks, everyone. All right. Just a reminder, I'm going to start with some questions that were sent in beforehand. If any of the analysts on the line would like to ask a question, they can raise their hand. I'll unmute you and put you on the line. We're going to start with two questions from Brendan from TD. The first question is: What can you confirm in terms of revenues for the RAC/autonomous lab segment and the AI Datapoints? How should we think about order funnel, backlog, revenue recognition for both moving forward?

Daniel Marshall

Jason, I think you might be muted by accident.

Jason Kelly

Sorry. There we go.

Daniel Marshall

You're good.

Jason Kelly

Thanks. As a reminder, we're not doing revenue guidance this year, so forward-looking, we don't have. We also aren't currently breaking out the revenue we're bringing in to date. We do have pretty different rev rec for automation versus data points and our other services as well. Steve, are you up for sharing a little bit on just how we approach that?

Steve Coen

Sure. Give a little insight. From the large government deal, we did have a preliminary contract with them. From that standpoint, there's some small amounts of revenue. The larger deal that everyone's talking about is that revenue will come about when we deliver and complete the install. Right now, we're really in the planning and coordination phase with that. That'll be at a point in time. With regards to Datapoints.

Jason Kelly

Revenue guidance this year, forward-looking, we don't have. We also aren't currently breaking out the revenue we're bringing in to date. We do have pretty different rev rec for automation versus Datapoints and our other services as well. Steve, are you up for sharing a little bit on just how we approach that?

Steve Coen

Sure. Give a little insight. From the large government deal, we did have a preliminary contract with them. From that standpoint, there's some small amounts of revenue. The larger deal that everyone's talking about is that revenue will come about when we deliver and complete the install. Right now, we're really in the planning and coordination phase with that. That'll be at a point in time. With regards to Datapoints is very much like the solutions business where we recognize revenue over time. Reminder, smaller projects than we've seen in the past. A good growth level. We're very happy with what we're seeing from growth in that. It's spread out over multiple quarters from that standpoint. A reminder, most of those projects take anywhere from three to nine months, maybe it's a little bit longer.

Steve Coen

Again, smaller deals compared to what we're used to, it'll spread out. Some of that's reflected in the numbers for Q2 for sure.

Jason Kelly

If I play that back, the revenue on the Datapoints business looks similar to what you would've seen before. All these automation deals, including the new academic deals we just signed with these four universities, those really are for the hardware part of it. It's recognition on delivery. I will point out, we also have an ongoing services and SaaS revenue for those. Once they're deployed, that would come in more regularly. You have to wait for deployment for that to show up, and you have to wait for the deployment for the revenue rec to show up, even if we get cash earlier.

Steve Coen

Exactly.

Daniel Marshall

Brendan's second question was: How should we think about the cadence of revenues to be recognized as part of the EMSL project at PNNL? Basically, which is similar.

Jason Kelly

That's the big national lab project Steve was just mentioning. I think we covered that.

Daniel Marshall

Sounds good. All right, let's move on to X. Our first question is from @busygnomedol. This question is: For Datapoints and Ginkgo Cloud Lab solutions, what is the customer repeat order rate, and what is the average follow-on order value as a percentage of the initial order value?

Jason Kelly

Again, we're not breaking it out in that much detail. What I will say is the way we typically end up having these deals happen is we'll get an initial proof of concept deal, then a much larger expanded deal if people are happy with it, then some amount of regular recurring work. I'd say there's probably two categories. The ADME work that I'm really excited about these new, I think, what did we say, 16 customers? A lot in the first six weeks is very exciting. These are new. Some of these are new logos for Ginkgo, which is great.

Jason Kelly

ADME is something that pharma companies are sort of just ordering off a conveyor belt a little bit as they're developing new molecules all the time, and that's why it's been sort of like a foundation of part of WuXi's CRO business. The work we're doing on Datapoints where we're, say, generating data for an AI model, that might come in campaigns where we're making a whole bunch of data. We do a proof of concept. We do some amount of data gen. Maybe the customer says, "Hey, I actually want more data for further model training." We generate more.

Jason Kelly

Then maybe they're like, "Okay, the next model I want to train on something else." It gets into some sort of pattern where they're actually using it a little closer to ADME, where they're designing constructs on the regular, they want more and more data of that sort. It can be a little more campaign-y if it's for an AI project versus some of these traditional CRO services, which are on and on and on. I am pretty excited to get into-- I like both those areas. The AI stuff is really taking off recently in general, I'm also pretty excited to go after the traditional CRO because it's just a reliable source of demand. We've got to prove ourselves. We're new in that area. I do like our odds there. Looks real good.

Daniel Marshall

All right, we have two questions. There's another question that's also about revenue recognition from X, I wonder if we can bundle that with another question that we got, which is about the announcement that we made today about the NSF announcements where four new autonomous labs are going to be built at universities across the country. I'll sort of ask both of these in one question. How do the recent autonomous, sorry, the recent announcement regarding autonomous labs at universities across the U.S. impact your outlook for other new academic labs? Is this just a product of the NSF investment, or do you see this becoming more of a trend across the board? How will revenue work with all that stuff too?

Jason Kelly

Yeah. I can speak to the sort of demand, and then Steve's going to chat on the rev rec. What I'm excited about on these is I think this is the beginning of showcasing that the academic research infrastructure, which by the way, NIH alone spends $40 billion a year out to our academic medical and academic research institutes in doing biological research. NSF spends on top of that, DARPA spends on top of that. There's actually a good amount of money that flows through this community. It's sort of an attempt at a paradigm shift for that group that at least some chunk of that work, and what's pretty interesting is we have really great partners in this.

Jason Kelly

If you look at the group at Caltech, they're focusing on a Cloud Lab, an autonomous lab, that does basically chemical structure data generation from chemicals originating in the natural world. If you look at the group at Northwestern, it's protein engineering. If you look at the group at MIT, it's for education uses, like training people on these things. Really, it's pretty cool to see, oh, and in Maryland it's biomanufacturing. Those are four disparate areas of biology research, but they're all running on the same underlying autonomous lab platform underneath. That's what I'm most excited to demonstrate is what we've been saying all along is this is an alternative to the lab bench. Across all those different labs doing very different things at academic research universities, they've all got lab benches.

Jason Kelly

They often have 60% or 70% the same equipment and then maybe 30% or 40% that's a little bit specialized in their area, but it's not an infinite list of equipment. The proposal is there should be a giant automation autonomous lab core in every biology department, and you could kind of close most of the labs down. That would be much less expensive. You'd have way more output from the graduate students. It would feel a little more like buying time on a data center. I think, I don't know. We'll see. I think depending on how this first batch of NSF labs go, I think you will see a good amount of FOMO among other research institutes that don't have these, if it goes well.

Jason Kelly

That should, I think, lead to both just immediate demand, or new grants, which you heard from Director Kratsios at OSTP, there's a push in this area. Even without directed funding to buy them, remember the universities, they have these overhead, they're spending to maintain all these labs. You could also say, "Well, hey, listen, if I could offset a bunch of my lab spending by adopting an autonomous lab, there may be money within the university for that, or donors that want to see it go in this direction." There's a lot of ways for universities to get money for, I think, interesting projects like this. I'm actually kind of bullish that it won't just be associated with new grants for robots, but I also think there will be new grants for robots.

Jason Kelly

Maybe last but not least, I do think it also trains a set of, you're sort of also starting to train the next generation of scientists with this approach to doing science, which I think is particularly important. I'm really excited about this program. I think it's going to be great for us. Steve, did you want to comment on that?

Steve Coen

Yeah.

Jason Kelly

I don't know if there's more to say on the rev rec, but yeah.

Steve Coen

Yeah, no. Bridging off what we just spoke about a few minutes ago about revenue and like, I should clarify, our legacy has been services where we get paid for the work over time. That's still true, as we mentioned, with Datapoints. With regards to the big block is when we deliver the equipment, install, but that also comes with services. I'm not going to get into the details of these contracts or the others, but we do get paid services, whether it be custom work. We absolutely have support services after the install and for which we have a long tail of revenue coming from that. We look at it, you have to think about that business model as equipment and support.

Steve Coen

The support could come in the front end, the support would definitely come in the back end on maintenance support and access and the like. That's sort of the model, but not getting into specifics. There's a twist on different contracts for what piece is what. That's what you should think about. Equipment delivery, that's when we recognize the bulk of revenue. Might be services up front, absolutely services after the fact.

Jason Kelly

Yep. That's inclusive of software licensing as well on the back end. So yeah.

Daniel Marshall

All right. I think that's all we got. Just a reminder to everyone, you don't have to wait for earnings to ask us questions. You can send us emails at [email protected], and we'll respond. Hope everyone is.

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-10

Ginkgo Bioworks Q1 Earnings Call Highlights

MarketBeat
Interested in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Ginkgo Bioworks is pivoting its 2026 strategy toward autonomous laboratories after selling its biosecurity business and creating a new company, Perimeter, while remaining a shareholder. The company’s first-quarter 2026 revenue from continuing operations fell to $19 million, but expenses and cash burn also declined; cash burn was $48 million and Ginkgo ended the quarter with $373 million in cash and no bank debt. Management says its Nebula autonomous lab platform is becoming central to the business, with more than 100 submitted protocols, integrations across 50+ devices, and partnerships with AI and cloud players like OpenAI, AWS, and Benchling helping validate the model. Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) said it is sharpening its 2026 focus on autonomous laboratories after completing the divestiture of its biosecurity business and reporting lower year-over-year cash burn in the first quarter. Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company’s central objective remains “to make biology easier to engineer,” but that its 2026 investment priorities will be centered on winning the emerging category of autonomous labs. Kelly said interest in the field has grown among Silicon Valley startups, AI companies and government organizations. → Wells Fargo’s Comeback Is Real—But Not Risk-Free “I do think we’re onto the right track with this focus for the company,” Kelly said. Ginkgo is pursuing the autonomous lab strategy in two main ways, Kelly said: running its own services on top of its Boston autonomous lab system, called Nebula, and selling autonomous lab systems to early adopters. He cited Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as an existing example of an outside customer. → Rocket Lab Posts Record Q1 Revenue, Raises Q2 Guidance Chief Financial Officer Steve Coen said Ginkgo’s first-quarter results reflect a change in financial presentation following the sale of its biosecurity business, which had previously been reported as a separate segment. Ginkgo announced the definitive agreement in February and closed the transaction on April 3. Coen said the transferred biosecurity assets met the criteria to be classified as held for sale and reported as discontinued operations as of March 31, 2026. As a result, the company is retrospectively recasting prior periods to remove biosecurity revenue, expen…Read full document

Interested in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Ginkgo Bioworks is pivoting its 2026 strategy toward autonomous laboratories after selling its biosecurity business and creating a new company, Perimeter, while remaining a shareholder. The company’s first-quarter 2026 revenue from continuing operations fell to $19 million, but expenses and cash burn also declined; cash burn was $48 million and Ginkgo ended the quarter with $373 million in cash and no bank debt. Management says its Nebula autonomous lab platform is becoming central to the business, with more than 100 submitted protocols, integrations across 50+ devices, and partnerships with AI and cloud players like OpenAI, AWS, and Benchling helping validate the model. Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) said it is sharpening its 2026 focus on autonomous laboratories after completing the divestiture of its biosecurity business and reporting lower year-over-year cash burn in the first quarter. Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company’s central objective remains “to make biology easier to engineer,” but that its 2026 investment priorities will be centered on winning the emerging category of autonomous labs. Kelly said interest in the field has grown among Silicon Valley startups, AI companies and government organizations. → Wells Fargo’s Comeback Is Real—But Not Risk-Free “I do think we’re onto the right track with this focus for the company,” Kelly said. Ginkgo is pursuing the autonomous lab strategy in two main ways, Kelly said: running its own services on top of its Boston autonomous lab system, called Nebula, and selling autonomous lab systems to early adopters. He cited Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as an existing example of an outside customer. → Rocket Lab Posts Record Q1 Revenue, Raises Q2 Guidance Chief Financial Officer Steve Coen said Ginkgo’s first-quarter results reflect a change in financial presentation following the sale of its biosecurity business, which had previously been reported as a separate segment. Ginkgo announced the definitive agreement in February and closed the transaction on April 3. Coen said the transferred biosecurity assets met the criteria to be classified as held for sale and reported as discontinued operations as of March 31, 2026. As a result, the company is retrospectively recasting prior periods to remove biosecurity revenue, expenses and cash flows from continuing operations. → The Great Crypto Thaw: Regulation Ignites an Infrastructure Boom “To be clear, all of the financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations,” Coen said. Kelly said the spin-off created a new company called Perimeter and brought in $60 million along with new investors focused on defense technology. Ginkgo remains a shareholder in Perimeter, he said. For the first quarter of 2026, Ginkgo reported revenue of $19 million from continuing operations, down 49% from the first quarter of 2025. Coen noted that the prior-year quarter included $7.5 million in non-cash revenue related to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding that item, revenue declined 37% year over year. Operating expenses also fell as a result of restructuring efforts. Research and development expense decreased 38% to $30 million from $49 million a year earlier, while general and administrative expense declined 35% to $13 million from $20 million. Net loss from continuing operations was $76 million, compared with a loss of $83 million in the prior-year period. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $42 million, compared with negative $44 million in the first quarter of 2025. Coen said adjusted EBITDA now includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which was $16 million in the quarter. He described that as a cash operating cost related to space Ginkgo is not occupying, net of sublease income, and said it could potentially be mitigated through subleasing. Cash burn in the quarter was $48 million, down 17% from $58 million in the first quarter of 2025. Coen said the quarter included a $14 million payment to Google Cloud tied to an October 2025 amendment that reset annual commitments and reduced future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms. Ginkgo ended the quarter with $373 million in cash and no bank debt, Kelly said. The company reaffirmed its full-year 2026 cash burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million. Kelly devoted much of the call to explaining Ginkgo’s autonomous lab strategy and how Nebula differs from traditional lab automation. He compared traditional automated workcells to subway systems: highly automated but limited to predefined routes. By contrast, he said an autonomous lab should combine automation with the flexibility scientists expect from a lab bench. Kelly said Ginkgo’s goal is to let scientists order experiments without manually moving samples among instruments or programming each step. He argued that autonomous labs could reduce space needs, increase utilization and make scientists more productive. According to Kelly, Ginkgo’s Nebula system has already supported more than 100 submitted protocols, including more than 30 unique protocols submitted by scientists rather than automation engineers. He said the system currently integrates more than 50 lab devices and is expanding to more than 100 reconfigurable automation carts, or RACs. Kelly said Ginkgo expects to connect 103 to 105 RACs into a single setup in Boston imminently. He described the installation of roughly 50 additional pieces of equipment over about three weeks as evidence that the company is doing something “very unique” in lab automation. Ginkgo’s hardware approach centers on RACs, which Kelly described as “a robot wrapped around each laboratory device.” The company also uses scheduling software called Catalyst to coordinate multiple protocols across the system. Kelly said the software is a key part of making open-ended experiments feasible on a shared automation platform. Kelly said Ginkgo is using its own service businesses — Ginkgo Cloud Lab, Ginkgo Datapoints and Ginkgo Solutions — to demonstrate the economics and capabilities of Nebula. He compared this internal demand to SpaceX using Starlink launches to test and utilize its launch platform. Ginkgo recently launched Ginkgo Cloud Lab, which allows users to request estimates for protocols through cloud.ginkgo.bio. Kelly said the service reflects the company’s view that lab work can become less expensive when automated and run with higher utilization. The company also highlighted its work with OpenAI, in which Kelly said GPT-5 controlled the lab across six rounds of experiment design. He said the project improved the cost of cell-free protein synthesis by 40% over the scientific state of the art, based on results Ginkgo previously announced in February. During the Q&A session, Kelly said future work with OpenAI could test how newer models perform at experimental design and data analysis, though he described the area as “open terrain.” Ginkgo also discussed new channels involving AWS, Benchling and Tamarind Bio, particularly around antibody workflows. In response to an analyst question submitted by Brendan at TD, Kelly said the company is not yet seeing a “flood of inbound” from those channels but is seeing some outreach and views them as an early step toward scientists ordering lab work directly from software platforms. On Ginkgo Datapoints, Kelly said the company has worked with 10 of the top biopharma companies since launching the offering about a year and a half ago. He said the potential revenue opportunity lies in repeat demand from customers building specialized biological models that need additional data. In response to a question from South Korea about how Nebula changes Ginkgo’s science operations, Kelly said the company sees a potential threefold reduction in space utilization compared with manual labs and a fourfold increase in available operating time, from roughly 40 hours per week to 168 hours per week. Kelly said individual protocols may not necessarily become shorter, but experiments can be started at times when a scientist would not normally remain in the lab, such as late in the day, allowing results to be available sooner. He also said automation should improve reproducibility because instrument errors and liquid handling issues are tracked through an audit trail. Kelly said the company expects autonomous labs to dramatically increase experimental throughput by lowering the effective cost of running samples. He framed Nebula as both a demonstration platform and a commercial asset for customers considering alternatives to manual lab benches. “That’s certainly what I’m leaning in on the company,” Kelly said. “It’s what we’re investing our capital into. It’s where our new customers are coming from.” Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc is a synthetic biology company that designs custom microbes for customers across a range of industries. Utilizing a proprietary organism foundry platform, the company engineers cells to produce high-value chemicals, enzymes, and other biological materials. By integrating automation, data analytics and machine learning, Ginkgo Bioworks seeks to accelerate the development of biologically derived solutions at industrial scale. The company's services span the entire development cycle, from genetic design and strain optimization to fermentation and downstream processing. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. The article "Ginkgo Bioworks Q1 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for May 2026.

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-09

Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Motley Fool
Image source: The Motley Fool. Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET Chief Executive Officer — Jason Kelly Chief Financial Officer — Steven Coen Director of Investor Relations — Daniel Marshall Need a quote from a Motley Fool analyst? Email [email protected] Jason Kelly: Thanks, Daniel. We always start with this. Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. And I mentioned this at the last earnings call, but in 2026, our focus will be on investing to win the category of autonomous labs. And I'm really excited, even since we just spoke a few months ago, this category has really been growing in attention, new companies in Silicon Valley pursuing this, a lot of interest from the AI Frontier labs about the application of AI models in science via autonomous labs. Government talking more about this. So I do think we're on to the right track with this focus for the company. The 2 big ways I'm going to be pursuing that goal in 2026, the first is to take our services in solutions, in data points and cloud lab and run them on top of our autonomous lab here in Boston that we call Nebula. That's a chance to prove out the capabilities of our system with real-world activities. And then the second big area of activity will be getting early adopters of autonomous labs out in the world to buy our systems like we've done already with Pacific Northwest National Labs that I talked about last time. So excited to pursue both of those, and you're going to hear more about it from me in the section. We also -- in the last quarter, we were able to close on a deal I talked about extensively last time, which is the spin-off of our biosecurity unit into a new company called Perimeter. I want to say congratulations to the team at biosecurity at Ginkgo and pulling that off, $60 million and a lot of great new investors coming into that focus really firmly in the area of defense tech and building sort of a biosecurity prime. Ginkgo is a shareholder in that company. We're super excited to see it succeed. And I think this is really nice, as I talked about last time, opportunity, both for Ginkgo to keep our focus on the autonomous labs and for the team at Perimeter to grow under their own brand with a new set of defense tech-focused investors. Our focus over the last couple of years was very much on getting these numbers where they are today, bringing down our cash burn in the company. We…Read full document

Image source: The Motley Fool. Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET Chief Executive Officer — Jason Kelly Chief Financial Officer — Steven Coen Director of Investor Relations — Daniel Marshall Need a quote from a Motley Fool analyst? Email [email protected] Jason Kelly: Thanks, Daniel. We always start with this. Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. And I mentioned this at the last earnings call, but in 2026, our focus will be on investing to win the category of autonomous labs. And I'm really excited, even since we just spoke a few months ago, this category has really been growing in attention, new companies in Silicon Valley pursuing this, a lot of interest from the AI Frontier labs about the application of AI models in science via autonomous labs. Government talking more about this. So I do think we're on to the right track with this focus for the company. The 2 big ways I'm going to be pursuing that goal in 2026, the first is to take our services in solutions, in data points and cloud lab and run them on top of our autonomous lab here in Boston that we call Nebula. That's a chance to prove out the capabilities of our system with real-world activities. And then the second big area of activity will be getting early adopters of autonomous labs out in the world to buy our systems like we've done already with Pacific Northwest National Labs that I talked about last time. So excited to pursue both of those, and you're going to hear more about it from me in the section. We also -- in the last quarter, we were able to close on a deal I talked about extensively last time, which is the spin-off of our biosecurity unit into a new company called Perimeter. I want to say congratulations to the team at biosecurity at Ginkgo and pulling that off, $60 million and a lot of great new investors coming into that focus really firmly in the area of defense tech and building sort of a biosecurity prime. Ginkgo is a shareholder in that company. We're super excited to see it succeed. And I think this is really nice, as I talked about last time, opportunity, both for Ginkgo to keep our focus on the autonomous labs and for the team at Perimeter to grow under their own brand with a new set of defense tech-focused investors. Our focus over the last couple of years was very much on getting these numbers where they are today, bringing down our cash burn in the company. We guided towards this, and Steve will touch on that in his section. But again, happy to have a very strong cash position, $373 million with no bank debt as of Q1 2026. And so you'll hear a little bit more from Steve on this. But this sets us up very nicely. We're well capitalized to pursue this area of autonomous labs. We have these base service businesses to build on top of and the lead in developing the technology and you put all that together. And I think we're by far the best bet in this sector. All right. I'm going to pass it on to Steve to dig into the financials. Steven Coen: Thanks, Jason. Before I walk through our financials, I want to take a moment to frame an important change in how we are presenting our results beginning in Q1 2026. As we announced in February, we entered into a definitive agreement to sell our biosecurity business, which was previously reported as a separate segment. Further, as Jason noted, we closed that transaction on April 3. The biosecurity transferred assets met the criteria under U.S. accounting to be classified as held for sale and the financial results reported as discontinued operations as of March 31, 2026. This is the first quarter in which biosecurity is reflected as discontinued operations within our financial statements. And to close with the accounting rules, we have and will retrospectively recast all prior periods presented to conform to this presentation. That means the revenue, operating expenses and cash flows previously attributed to the biosecurity business are removed from each line item of our continuing operations and cash flows as the prior period information is presented, including for Q1 of last year. The former biosecurity results are now reported as a single net line loss from discontinued operations, below loss from continuing operations. To be clear, all of the financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations. We will not be discussing the biosecurity business further in our prepared remarks. On April 7, 2026, for your information, we filed a current report on Form 8-K that includes pro forma financial information for fiscal year's 2023, 2024 and 2025 on a continuing operations basis. Following the biosecurity divestiture, we now operate as a single segment. So with that, I'll now discuss our Q1 results. Revenue was $19 million in the first quarter of 2026, down 49% compared to the first quarter of 2025. As previously disclosed, revenue in the first quarter of 2025 included $7.5 million in noncash revenue relating to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding this, revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was down 37% from the prior year period. It is important to note that our net loss includes a number of noncash and other nonrecurring items as detailed more fully in our financial statements. Because of these noncash and other nonrecurring items, we believe adjusted EBITDA is a more indicative measure of our profitability. A full reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and GAAP net loss from continuing operations can be found in the appendix. In the first quarter of 2026, R&D expense decreased 38% from $49 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $30 million in the first quarter of 2026. G&A expense decreased 35% from $20 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $13 million in the first quarter of 2026. These decreases were all driven by our restructuring efforts. Net loss from continuing operations was $76 million in the first quarter of 2026 compared to a loss of $83 million in the prior year period. The reduction in loss year-over-year was due to our restructuring efforts. Moving further down the page, you'll note that adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2026 was negative $42 million, which was down from negative $44 million in the first quarter of 2025. Since we are now only operating in a single segment, we only present a single measure of adjusted EBITDA, and it is important to note that adjusted EBITDA includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which you can see was $16 million in the first quarter of 2026. Previously, this cost would not have been included in the former presentation of segment adjusted EBITDA. This cost represents the base rent and other charges relating to lease space which we are not occupying net of sublease income. This is a cash operating cost that is not related to driving revenue right now and can be potentially mitigated through subleasing. And finally, cash burn in the first quarter of 2026 was $48 million, down from $58 million in the first quarter of 2025, a 17% decrease. As previously reported, in October 2025, we amended and reset the annual commitments with Google Cloud for $14 million. Resetting the commitment reduced our future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms and extended the commitment term from 3 to 6 years. We paid this $14 million in Q1 of 2026, which is reflected in our cash burn for the quarter. Excluding the payment to Google Cloud, cash burn reflects a significant decrease in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025, which was a direct result of the restructuring. Now turning to guidance. As we discussed in February, 2026 is about continuing to be cost efficient, while investing in our AI robotics and software to bring autonomous labs to our bioscience customers, including the build-out of our Frontier Autonomous Lab in Boston. We have turned the page on our pure focus on restructuring actions to focus this year not only on cost efficiency, but on investing in what we see as our opportunities while continuing to provide our customers the advanced services that they have come to extend. For these reasons, we believe cash burn best reflects our continuing services and tools and further investments in autonomous labs. In terms of outlook for the full year, we are reaffirming our overall cash burn guidance for 2026, totaling $125 million to $150 million. This range reflects a firm balance amongst cost efficiency, continuing services and tools and further investments we are making. In conclusion, we are pleased with our continued improvements in cash burn efficiency and our business pursuits for 2026. And with that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jason. Jason Kelly: Thanks, Steve. So I'm going to dive in on the strategic section. I'm excited to go into this today. Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. And the way we're really aiming to solve that problem, we believe the bottleneck fundamentally is the laboratory work associated with bioengineering. And so I'm going to dig deep today and talk about why autonomous labs will be replacing the lab bench. I want to highlight some of what we're doing with Nebula, our system because we have some news this month in terms of expanding that system. And then finally, the services that we put on top of Nebula, our cloud lab, data points and solutions. These are sort of like, we call it, like our Starlink, right? If you think about SpaceX, 70% of the launches last year were actually Starlink, their own internal product, in the coming year, the ability for us to scale up on autonomous lab and showcase that you can make money on services without having people in the middle of the lab doing those laboratory services, I think, is a real highlight and will help drive sales of our systems into the world. So I'm going to talk about all 3, and let's dive in. Okay. So I gave this analogy. I'm going to do it again because I think this is for new folks listening on the call, it's worth understanding what we say when we say autonomous lab as distinct from traditional lab automation. So I'm going to give an analogy from the transportation industry. On the y-axis here, we have the amount of automation for a certain type of transport. And on the x-axis, the request flexibility. In other words, the users asking the transportation system to do something different or not. And so for a low request flexibility and a high level of automation, that's your subway, right? It's the red line here in Boston, you sit down in the subway, and it takes you away. You don't have to do anything, it is high level of automation, totally automated transport, but it is very inflexible. You have to want to go to one of the stops on the red line. Low amount of automation, high amount of flexibility. That's a car, right? You get your hands on the wheel, foot on the pedals and it'll take a ride, take a ride to your house or to the grocery store anywhere you want to go. And that's roughly what the transportation system has looked like for the last 100 years. Let's go to the next slide. You've been to California in the last 4 or 5 years or now L.A. or Austin or soon in Boston and you sat in the back seat of a Waymo, and it is amazing, it is like sitting on a subway, you don't have to do anything, but it will take you right to your house. It has the flexibility of a car. And so it's those 2 things together that sort of flexibility plus a high level of automation that mean we actually give it a new name, we don't call it an automated car, we call it an autonomous car. Because up until now, you've needed a human being with our brain in the loop in order to manage that amount of flexibility into the system. All right. So if you look at the next slide, you'll see the miles traveled by cars and trucks versus subways and trains in the United States, it's more than 99% in cars and trucks. And that's not because we don't know about subways. It's that we need that flexibility to do our day-to-day lives, that it's required for the transportation that humans need. All right. So now let's go into the lab bench and into the lab. So low amount of flexibility, high amount of automation. We have actually automation in the lab. It's called a work cell. That's a 3D schematic of a work cell we have here at Ginkgo. Companies like HighRes, Thermo and Biosero make these. And they're like a subway, right? They're great. They're fully automated. They'll do an experiment without a scientist in the loop, but it better be the experiment that you ordered yesterday. It's not going to do a new experiment for you today. Low amount of automation, high amount of flexibility. We have those 2 in the lab. It's called the lab bench. And you, as a scientist are basically the human glue, connecting all of these different devices in the lab together to do whatever protocol you want to do. And so again, here's the kicker. If you look at research budgets between laboratory work cells, which are used in things in pharma companies like high-throughput screening or combinatorial chemistry or things like that versus at the lab bench it's about 95% plus at the bench. And again, it's not like we don't know about work cells. It's that scientists need flexibility to explore all the different hypotheses they have for discovering a new drug or developing a new crop trait or whatever type of biotechnology they're doing. So this is what we're trying to build at Ginkgo. We're trying to get up to that top right corner and make a Waymo. We're trying to make an autonomous lab that has the flexibility of the bench so scientists can order whatever experiment they want, but the automation of a work cell. In other words, they don't have to be there to do each and every step and move the samples among the different equipment and program the equipment. They can just hit go and have that protocol run end-to-end for them via the automation, but whatever they want to order that day. That's the target. And look, if you go to the next slide, the value prop here, I think, is very clear for getting rid of the lab bench, massive overhead cost savings. You've heard a lot about overhead costs at academic research labs and things like that. That's really paying for ultimately, millions of square feet of laboratory space, it's 50 million square feet of laboratory space just in the Boston area. So you can dramatically reduce that. You can increase the research productivity of your human scientists as we need more data from AI, and we'll talk about that in a minute. And then we can enable AI scientists to run these lab-in-the-loop experiments. We just announced a project with OpenAI a few months ago, where GPT5 ran our lab. That's that kind of lab in the loop. Experiments that we're seeing increasingly also in the biopharma industry. But to put a point on it, like a typical large pharma, biopharma biotech spends $1 billion to $3 billion a year on research, not clinical trials, but spending on 1 million-plus square feet of lab benches. And if you look at their spending within that on automation, it's well below $100 million, usually much less. And frankly, I think those numbers should flip. I think really, the majority of the capital should be going towards automated laboratory work rather than manual benches. And the reason for that is, I think, a relatively straightforward calculation. On the next slide, you can see comparison between a traditional manual lab and an autonomous lab. It's about a threefold space improvement. When you take all these -- this equipment that's often very spread out in a normal human-operated lab because people need to get around it and safety reasons and all these things. But in an autonomous lab, you can jam all that equipment right next to each other about as tight as you can make it for the arms to work and things like that. So it's about a threefold space reduction. And then -- the manual labs really are just run 40 hours a week, right? I mean, it's when people come in the lab and humans are there, and they got to be there, and that's when you can get people to work. There's almost never multiple shifts in these types of sort of high-end research labs. It's really a 40-hour work week. And our system here in Nebula is running 168 hours a week. So 24/7, and that's a fourfold improvement in sort of hours available for utilization of your laboratory. So I think a real clear, threefold, fourfold on 2 different axes. It is a clear value driver if you go to the next slide. I think there's little question the ROI is there. I think the big question with autonomous labs is a technical one. It's how do you get that high level of automation and the high level of flexibility, that top right corner without a human being in the loop, right? It's the same question of the Waymo, how do you get it to navigate all these different environments and different roads without a human in the loop, if you can do it, it's an obvious win. If we can do this in the lab, it's an obvious win. All right. So let me talk through a little bit the design constraints that we focused on at Ginkgo. On the next slide, you can see a work cell, one of those subways, the way it's designed is it's designed against a particular protocol. So if you're a biopharma company and you want to build a high-throughput screening work cell and you call a traditional automation vendor, they're going to -- first question they're going to ask you is, tell me about your protocol and tell me what throughput you need to run out. How many samples do you want to get through every week? Because they're building you a subway line. It's going to be built to do that protocol for you. But if you're a new facility head who is opening a lab in Central Square here in Cambridge, and you are building it for a scientific lead. You don't ask that scientific lead, "hey, what's the protocol you're going to run in this lab that 30 of your scientists are going to use to do work?" You say, "what kind of science you're doing?" And very specifically, "what equipment do you want me to install in that lab so that your scientists can be productive over the next 3 to 5 years as they use the lab?" And so it is oriented around the equipment rather than the protocol. And that's a sort of a subtle point, but it has a huge amount of consequences when it comes to how you design the hardware and software that responds to this challenge. And so if you go to the next slide, you can see our hardware solution here is what we call our rack carts, our reconfigurable automation carts. And we have -- it's basically a robot wrapped around each laboratory device. So we have control over that environment. There's a HEPA filter on the top, which is important for a lot of biological work. We have opportunities for contamination and things like that. We have a 6-axis robotic arm and a piece of magnetic motion track, allows you to, if you go to the next slide, LEGO block these together into ultimately very large setups. And we're at 50-plus right now in the lab and it's growing quickly. I'll show you some photos in a second. We have 103 racks will be coming online just in about a week, all in one big setup here in Boston. And so, if you go to the next slide, we can -- I want to show -- this is actually a video of the OpenAI protocol. So we had this project with OpenAI, where GPT5 controlled the lab, and we made a video of one of the samples just moving through the various racks for that protocol. And so this just gives you a sense of like how does it work, right? So you have these tracks and we're able to move like our one sort of constraint on the system is that we pass things in what's called SBS format. So that little rectangle you saw there is like a 3 x 5-inch square -- rectangle and it can contain 96 or this is a 384-well plate or 1586 well plate. It can also carry consumables like tips and other things. And the arm picks up that piece of plastic wear or samples or tips or whatever it might be, and then puts it on to a particular device. So in this case, it's going -- just went through an acoustic liquid handler. Now it's going on to a bravo, liquid handler. You saw, again, that first thing that got put down there was actually the plastic tips that are now getting picked up by the liquid handler. And the other 2 plates or sort of sample and destination plate. So we're -- in this case, for the OpenAI project, we're picking up some synthetic DNA, and we're putting it into reaction mixes that were designed by the GPT5 model at the time, right? And so again, a key feature here is any device that accepts those SBS plates, we can integrate into the racks. It takes us usually like 1 month to 1.5 months if it's a new device. We've now got 80-plus devices on there. We're adding new devices all the time. If a customer asks us for one, if we want to add one to Nebula, we just bring it online. So now that plate is going to get shaken up and put on to ultimately thermocycler or the final analytical device to run the qPCR reactions and give a readout on the performance of each one of those samples back to, in this case, an AI model. That data at most of the runs on Nebulas going back to a human scientist, as opposed to an AI scientist. But we expect there will be a mix of both as science goes forward, we'll have both scientists and their agents ordering experiments on autonomous labs. Go to the next slide. Great thing about this system is it can expand. We started Nebula, I think was about 8 racks, doing NGS like next-generation sequencing prep for our samples here at Ginkgo and expanded ultimately now up to over 100 racks on the system. So let's dig in a little bit. I want to go to the next section. So that was sort of the theory, like how we design the hardware in order to solve some of the challenges of the autonomous lab and what autonomy means. And now I want to dig in a little bit on Nebula specifically, because I think what's really unique about Ginkgo is we're not just a hardware company. We actually run BSL-2 labs here in Boston and do scientific partnerships with some of the largest biotech, ag biotech, industrial biotech companies in the world. And so we can actually show what it looks like to do real science on a system like this. And so if you go to the next slide, one of the things I'm quite proud of that we've been able to show in the last quarter is over 100 protocols with more than 30 of them being unique, submitted by scientists, and I'll mention this, but these are not being submitted by automation engineers or experts in robotics. Being submitted onto our system, Nebula here in Boston, which has 50-plus lab devices all integrated together where you can send point-to-point samples from any device to any other device as requested by those scientists. There is nothing else like Nebula in the world today, doing sort of open-ended science like this at this scale with this number of unique protocols and end users. And it's proof that autonomous labs are feasible. I mean there's work to do and we talked about that. Things break as we are scaling this up. That's for sure but it is evidence, in my view, that this is going to land, like we are going to beat the manually operated lab. And so if you go to the next slide, I want to walk through a few of the key things that you got to show if you're going to take out one of those laboratory floors at Takeda or Merck or Novartis or whatever or Bayer Crop Science or any of these companies that do a lot of laboratory work. So first, you want to connect 100-plus devices in a single automation setup, all right? So it can't just be 5 or 10. A scientist expects to have access to many different devices in order to do whatever protocol they might read about in a scientific paper this week. And then I think about 100 is the right number. So we've been able to -- this week, we'll find out, we're turning it on in about 5 days. 105 all -- or 103 racks, all in one big setup. And the reason we can do that is because of that rack productized hardware, that cart I showed you. We just rolled in, they came in off a truck and we rolled another 50 in and those have all gone in the actual install over the last 3 or 4 weeks. So it's pretty fast to put that many new devices on an automated setup. We'll see if it works. Second, we have run 10 now like a 30-plus unique protocols, 100-plus different -- 100-plus total protocols. But that's kind of -- you got to get in that, I think, 50 to 100 to maybe 200 unique protocols, all running on the autonomous lab at the same time. And we do that with our catalyst. This is our software, our scheduler that we built is a very complicated scheduling problem. It's really easy to mess this up. Biology is very sensitive to timing. Things break all the time as we keep driving the scale up here. So we're getting to do that quick cycle of debugging and improving the system, but that scheduler is really the key piece of software driving that. And then finally, scientists, scientists, not automation engineers, and I think on a peak day on Nebula, we had 439 or so scientists submitting. So that's really exciting like to have that many different scientists submitting protocols on one automation system. Again, I don't know of any automation system in the world that's been able to do that before. And we're able to do that in part by leveraging AI coding tools with custom harnesses wrapped around them that basically understand how to transfer the scientist's intent in human language into code to operate the autonomous lab. And that is a big unlock. We're very thankful for what's going on with all the coding agents. That's a real help for improving the ease of use because at the end of the day, to make robots do something, you have to program them. And to walk up to a lab bench and do your work by hand, you don't. So we have to solve this problem. We can't make it so that scientists have to become coders to do their job, and we've really just been giving a gift by these AI coding tools, again, like the Codex and the cloud codes and things like that, that can sit inside other tools that are specific to the automation to get this done. So those are the 3 big ones, and I'm pretty happy with the progress at all. So if you go to the next slide, as I mentioned several times now, we're going from 50 to 105 racks by the end of this month. It's going to be awesome. It's a really cool system to see people should come out and visit it. If you go to the next slide, that scheduler is not trivial. So this is an example of our scheduler, I think, running 17 or 20 different protocols at the same time. Each color is a different protocol. Each row is a different device on the system. The x-axis is time. And so you can imagine if you want to add a new protocol to that, and you're like, okay, I need to use the device on row 3, the device on row 7 and the device on row 9 and I need the device on row 3 for the first 3 minutes, then I'm not willing to tolerate up to 1 hour gap then the second device for 15 minutes, then up to a 30-minute gap than the last device. It will check, can it fit you in. And if it can fit you in, or if it can fit you in by moving a couple of other things that doesn't disrupt them in a way that breaks the protocol, it will fit you in. That's awesome, right? That's very much not how the traditional lab automation, the subways work. They're running a batch, that subway line is showing up at a certain time. You can't just jump and insert yourself in the middle, but you can with our scheduling software here. On the next slide, the little green one, it's hard to see, but that column, third column over from the left over there has the names of all the different scientists submitting. So I'd really love this. I love that we're seeing different people submitting different orders for protocols every day. It's really exciting. And again, I think it's unique. We're also seeing a lot of energy on the U.S. government side. If you have the next slide, a lot of new policy action here, there's the genesis mission, which we're fortunate to be a part of from the White House to bring AI into the national labs. But there's a big motion right now where we're seeing an increasing amount of drug discovery work moving to China from Kendall Square, I was talking about earlier here in the Boston area. And that's because simply Chinese scientists are paid 1/3 as much and they're doing equal work to what's happening here in the U.S., like they're just as good. They're just as smart. And so I think if we want to remain competitive, we got to think about doing our research in a fundamentally different way in the United States. I don't think we can just rest on our laurels of having the only smart scientists in the world in this area or at least versus China. And I think that era is over -- firmly over at this point. And so we've got to think about a new way to do it. I'm pretty heartened to see activity out of the National Science Foundation is funding $100 million for a network of cloud laboratories and autonomous labs. There's a new bill introduced by Senator Young to sort of do more of this cloud labs and autonomous labs. So hopefully, we see more here, but I'm encouraged by what we see already. If you go to the next slide. We're obviously very fortunate. I had a chance in December to sort of ribbon cut the first our RAC robots going into Pacific Northwest National Labs and signed a new contract for $47 million, much larger autonomous lab set up nearly 100 RACs going in a new building in a couple of years at PNNL. So this is really exciting, and I think sort of highlights the direction I believe our national labs will go, our scientific research in the country. If you go to the next slide, we were lucky to give ARPA-H, a tour of Nebula. We have a great project with them. And the work is accelerated by having these autonomous labs available to our scientist at Ginkgo. I think this is something that makes a lot of sense for a lot of labs at the National Institute of Health, for example, or NSF-funded labs or academic research universities. They would all be accelerated if our scientific talent could get many more of their hypothesis tested than are today due to the limitation of the manual lab. Next slide. listen, Nebula is showcasing what is possible, and that means that early adopters are getting excited about it. So we are also building autonomous labs for that left end of the chart here, the very earliest adopters, the people that are excited to try this out as a different way as an alternative to their lab benches. And so we'll keep leaning in there, building those systems as that demand comes in. And we are seeing, if you go to the next slide, a lot of interest. So we've had 600-plus visitors in the first quarter. I'll show it at the end, we have a great -- like a little sign up. You can sign up. We do tours weekly, if any of you want to sign up or listening in, we're very happy to give you a tour. So okay, so that's Nebula and that's the dive on that, right? Now I want to talk a little bit about our service businesses, Cloud Labs, data points and solutions, which I think of a little bit, like I said, like our Starlink, right? So last year, 70% of the launches at SpaceX were Starlink, if you go to the next slide. That's a huge advantage for SpaceX. That means they get to be creating an asset, a moneymaking asset in the form of Starlink while also getting to test over and over again, their launch platform. And their launch platform, ultimately, I think in their view, is the big product, right, that they can have that sort of transportation layer to space. But Today, they're 70% of the demand for that platform, right? I see a similar situation with the autonomous lab. We are able to have a big system here in Boston and basically prove out moving over our work from data points, Ginkgo Cloud Lab solutions, even our reagents business onto that platform. And if you go to the next slide, really excited. We got our cloud lab off the ground just in the last quarter, it's really been exciting. This is from The Times of London. Do you want to run an experiment for $39 -- there's a lot to do it for you. Go check out cloud.ginkgo.bio. You can go in the estimate tab at the top, type in whatever protocol you're interested in. It will look up and see do we have the equipment needed to do your protocol? And if so, it will make an estimate of what the price would be to run that protocol in a cloud lab. And people are, I think, pretty surprised at how inexpensive it can be. And that is a reflection of where all the costs lie in doing lab work, which is in. Manual lab work done, 40 hours a week done at low equipment density, low equipment utilization in laboratories that cost a fortune to run. That then flows through, and it means all of the CRO services you order and so on are very expensive. We think we can solve that problem through automation and the cloud.ginkgo.bio or cloud lab service is really a great way to do that. If you go to the next slide, this is what OpenAI took advantage of when we did this project where GPT5 ran the lab, and we had an awesome result back in February, we showed that after 6 rounds of design, we had improved the cost of cell-free protein synthesis by 40% over scientific state-of-the-art, that opened a lot of eyes. I think people weren't really -- we didn't know ahead of time whether the models would even be able to design experiments and interpret data at this level of sophistication. So really excited about that, really excited about future work we're going to be doing to keep proving this out with AI. It's a neat line of work. I would say it's distinct from the autonomous lab, I call this really an AI scientist. Using the autonomous lab, using a cloud lab to get its work done. But it is all a really important thing to watch if you're following kind of how AI is changing science. On the next slide. Also excited just in the last quarter, 3 new channels coming to our delivery business to our cloud lab and data point service. Amazon Biodiscovery got launched by AWS which is basically a platform to allow you to design antibodies. All 3 of these are sort of in the antibody space, Benchling similarly and then Tamarind Bio. These are -- Tamarind and Amazon are sort of ways for pharma companies to access these frontier bio models. So if you think of things like AlphaFold, which got the Nobel Prize for Demis at Google, those -- that was like one of the earliest protein design models. There's many more now. They're computationally intensive. They're interesting and they help drug discovery scientists come up with a design for an antibody or a protein for their drug. But then you got to test it, right? Like we don't know if these things work in biology unless you go into the lab. And so the idea is, could you have these layers where you access the latest models and all the compute to power them. And then when you're ready to do your experiment, you hit a button and it kicks the designs to a cloud lab to do it for you and the data flows back very nicely, well packaged right to the model and you can run that loop as many times as you want. So that's sort of what's going on with Amazon and Tamarind and then Benchling is really the leader in electronic lab notebooks. And it's a similar idea. If you're in ELN as a scientist and you've designed this experiment, could you ultimately hit go and kick it off to a cloud and we partner there with our data point service again around antibodies. So super exciting to see these. I think this is like early indications of a way that could become a norm for how scientists do their work in the future and kind of order their laboratory experiments. I'll just say a couple of more quick things about data points. Really excited about the progress here, working with 10 of the top biopharma companies in the world just in the first year of running it. It's a good mix of pharma and government and even tech companies and tech bio companies. We've done a nice job on the next slide of really being a community leader here. We're running competitions. There's a virtual cell pharmacology initiative where we'll actually test compounds for free. People should definitely check that out if you're in the small molecule drug discovery space. So really need opportunities and we hope to see summits and things like that. It's been good. I think AI as applied to the design of drugs is a big area. And with data points, we're sort of operating almost like a scale AI, like creating those just big data packages to train the models. All right. Next slide. We have had a long-standing business in solutions, more than 250 of these research partnerships over the last 10 years. It's gotten us to work with the R&D groups of some of the largest companies in pharmaceuticals, industrial biotech and agricultural biotech. And uniquely at Ginkgo, it is a huge range of different kinds of research from microbes associated with the roots of corn and trying to engineer them to produce fertilizer to mRNA therapeutics or antibody development and pharmaceuticals to enzymes for industrial biotech, really wide range of different types of genetic engineering and biotech lab work that has happened at Ginkgo in sort of not totally automated way. In other words, not like no people in the lab, but like semi-automated. So human interacting with a liquid handling robot and a human interacting with various benchtop devices that can take a lot of samples at once. So we were sort of like not all the way to an autonomous lab, but we're doing a lot of variable work for years in semi-automated setups. And so if you go to the next slide, I'm most excited to move this kind of work on to Nebula. It is the hardest work to move, right? This is the stuff that really is that car, I mentioned earlier, the lab bench. It's totally variable. It's really different. It's not just doing the same experiment over and over again like you would in a traditional CRO. But if you remember my slide, it's where 95% of the spending is going at all of our customers. They spend a bit with us, but they mostly spend on huge internal research labs to do this kind of work. And so we want to replace the manual lab bench, migrating the work from our solutions business onto Nebula is a really critical demonstration. So I'm excited about the progress there. We're trying to share that publicly, and we bring people through. If you go to the next slide, one of the best things we do is we bring people through, show them a lab, let them talk to our scientists, see how scientists are submitting new protocols every day. And this has been really exciting to bring research leaders from -- I don't know, 3 heads of pharma or ag R&D come through to visit just this year, right, to see the system. And so if you just want to visit, there's the link, you really should come by. But I think Nebula and our services on top of it is a truly unique asset to demonstrate what we think fundamentally is a better way to do biotech R&D. And we would love to get it in at every company out there and replace their benches. So if you go to the next slide, that is the world that I want to see. And so please, if you're interested, you can e-mail me at [email protected]. Happy to follow up and happy to take your questions now. Thank you. Daniel Marshall: [Operator Instructions] We have one to start off submitted from Brendan at TD. We got it over e-mail. He has 2 questions. So the first one is, how should we think about the potential impact to revenues this year from the AWS and Benchling announcements? How have the launches gone thus far? And what is baked into your assumptions for the rest of 2026 for these new platforms? Jason Kelly: Yes, I can take that one. So yes, we talked about AWS and Benchling. The other one in that same category as the Tamarind Bio partnership as well. I'm super excited about this. I mean this is the first time I've seen this sort of kind of like cloud layer talking directly to labs as a sales channel. So I'm excited to see where it goes. It is definitely new, right? So like seeing like a flood of inbound there. We are seeing some people are reaching out to us because of the channel, so that's exciting. I'm most excited that it's starting around antibodies, right? Because that's just kind of naturally there's a number of these AI models associated with antibodies and so on and because there's a few different providers that will do these antibody services for you. But what I'm most excited about is with our cloud lab, we're not limited to testing an antibody binding, right? If you look already on the, I don't know, 8 or 9, 10 protocols we posted, we're posting a new one every week. It's a pretty wide variety of stuff. We're doing mass spec metabolomics, all kinds of things. And so you can come and ask for a protocol and Cloud lab, we'll add it. I'd love that to turn into a channel straight from an electronic lab notebook or whatever, where a scientist is like, this is the protocol I want, price it. You get a price back from cloud.ginkgo.bio and then you go run your experiment. I think that's a much -- that feels a lot closer to AWS and sort of like what we saw is successful with cloud compute. Than where these are today, which is really much more just in a more narrow lane around antibodies, which I think is an exciting place to start. But I am super excited to fan that out. I think that -- then it could become really quite an interesting channel and something that scientists just don't have access to today. At the end of the day, you can't get custom stuff done. So I think that's what I am most excited about there. Daniel Marshall: Cool. All right. Next question from Brendan. What are you hearing on data points and the collective AI-driven offerings with Ginkgo are especially attractive for customers as biotech and pharma companies continue to roll out their own AI capabilities. In other words, what kind of demand dynamics are you seeing here? And are there any potential revenue funnel unlocks we should watch for over the coming quarters from this part of the business? Jason Kelly: Yes. So I've been super -- I mean we launched data points, almost 1.5 years ago now, and to have 10, the top pharma companies as customers now is really exciting. I think the revenue unlock is just repeat business from those customers. And so we are starting to see that and what we saw, what sort of like pilot projects, data gen projects and then now you've got again because you are seeing people trying to build in-house models. Now remember, like these are not reasoning models. These are not like in-house versions of Claude or Codex or OPUS or whatever or GPT5. They are models trained on biological data. So they're much more specialized. And so I do think it makes sense actually in the field that you're going to see a lot of people having their own data sets, their own models that are sort of tuned up versions maybe of various protein models. That's not going to be uncommon at all, much more common than I think you'll see in the reasoning model and coding space because these things are very different and people have different data sets. And so I'm, sort of, hopeful as people are building these models, we'll keep seeing the sort of repeat demand as they're like, okay, I found one. I like what I'm seeing in terms of return on data and performance of my internal model, give me more data. And so that's the revenue unlock. And the more that we see, then I think we become sort of like a default provider that's certainly what happened with scale and other places in the early days of image models and then language models when people saw, oh, I'm seeing performance increase with more data, they turn around and bought more data. That's what we're going to be watching as these protein models and other and it does not disrupt other types of models come out too in the future. I think that's the lane for data points. Daniel Marshall: Cool. Sort of on the theme of AI, we have someone who is on X who asked us a question. I think this is sort of based on our project with OpenAI. How much efficiency improvements after using GPT 5.5. Any idea for space left for improvement, will this be a transitional factor? Jason Kelly: Yes. So we had this project and just to remind that we announced back in February with OpenAI, our first project with them, where we had GPT, it's actually not 5.5, it's 5. We started much earlier, and that was when -- that was the model that was out and we kind of kept the same model through the whole thing for like more scientific paper purposes. And so we were able to show over a series of 6 rounds of running the model with 100, 384-well plates designed by GPT5 per round, a 40% improvement over state-of-the-art in the scientific goal we were trying to achieve. I think there's real interesting questions, a, how much further could you push that, like sort of what is actually diminishing returns look like in some of these scientific areas? Can the model have sort of breakthrough ideas that create really new ways of doing this? TBD. And then as the models have gotten better, yes. And would 5.5 be better than what we got with 5, right? I think that's all going to be exciting stuff to test. So we're excited to do more with OpenAI and we're planning to. And so I think this is an open terrain in terms of how good the reasoning models can be at basically experimental design and experimental analysis. That's -- those are the 2 things it's really doing. It's like here's an experiment. I want to run, give me back the data cloud lab, autonomous lab, give me back what are the results of my experiments I just designed and then I'm going to analyze them and design more experiments. We'll say, I think it's real exciting to watch what's going to be capable of there. It's a new way to do science. It really is. Like -- and I won't belabor this too much, but I think it roughly can turn individual -- like the access to a model like that plus an autonomous lab can let individual scientists operate closer to how a principal investigator of an academic lab or a head of a drug discovery group who has lab of 8 people or a lab of 30 people and it's sort of assigning hypotheses to different people and kind of pursuing that over time. An individual could push that out for probably close to the same cost as they are currently costing to be themselves at a lab bench in terms of their just -- their utility costs and everything else and utilization, low utilization of equipment, they could push out 5 agents on top of an autonomous lab to go pursue a bunch of experiments. That is real exciting if that works. I think it really fundamentally changes the rate we can do science. That's why you see the Genesis mission in the U.S. investing in this sort of stuff because their goal is to 2x the output of U.S. science. That's a way that will do it. And our science-based industries, of which pharma is the biggest will be completely changed by this. If you can, 2 or 3x the rate, no question about it. Daniel Marshall: All right. Our next question is really a bundle of questions from DK, who's writing from South Korea. And these questions are all about how the move on to Nebula, our autonomous lab has sort of changed the science that we're doing. So the questions are, how does the use of Ginkgo's automated lab affect overall costs? Are there meaningful differences in speed, for example, turnaround time for experiments? And have you observed improvements in success rates, reproducibility or scalability since moving to the autonomous lab? Jason Kelly: Yes. So on cost, I tried to touch on this a little bit in the talk. But I think like the clear ROI not just for us but for any one of our customers looking at an autonomous lab, is about a threefold reduction in space utilization compared to a manual lab and a fourfold increase in that time. In other words, like the amount of time the lab is being used to do lab work, right, from that 40 hours to 168, 24/7 week. That's really that -- those improvements is where it's going to yield the cost reduction. But that is a huge amount because those are really the 2 -- like sort of people time and space time are the 2 big things we spend money on in research. On the speed front, yes, it's interesting. An individual protocol doesn't really get shorter like than necessarily you would do it at the bench. You can imagine ways to do that in the future rebuild protocols differently. But the first thing scientists are going to do is just take work they're doing at the bench and move it on to the autonomous lab. And in that world, it does not need to get faster in terms of like end-to-end time for the protocol. However, in practice can get faster because you can start a protocol at 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon where you never would have planned to spend the next 7 hours in the lab, kick it off and have the thing run overnight. So in that world, you took an experiment that you would have started tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. and started at 4:00 p.m. and have the results by tomorrow at 8:00 am or 10 a.m. And so that can shave a whole day off. So I think you will see actually a massive speed up because scientists will start taking advantage of the 4x more time that they have available every week. So if they plan it right, in theory, you can see a fourfold improvement in a lot of the times, depending on how serialized your experiments need to be. So I think that's really exciting in our side, I think I really like that. And then on the -- just sort of like improvement in like I say, I would call this like the quality of the experiments. I think reproducibility is inherently advantaged on automation. And that's mainly to do with like the audit trail. Like you kind of if an instrument errors, if a liquid handler makes mistake, these are all tracked. So you kind of know like those experiments that you don't catch at the manual lab bench, you catch if there's such a mistake on the autonomous lab. So if you saw really, wow, that's a surprising result. You might go back, look at your experiments and say like, oh, I see what I did there, I like design this experiment in a way that was like a little silly, and that's actually what's giving me this result as opposed to assuming you did the experiment you wanted to do and that was the origin of this like amazing result you got. I think yes, that's a common thing that can happen. For no nefarious reasons from scientists at the bench. And so I think that -- you will see a big improvement in reproducibility. And then the other thing that got brought up there was throughput, the throughput increase is going to be the same. I think people are surprised when they go to cloud.ginkgo.bio, which I encourage people to do and type in a protocol and see how much it costs. Because I'm basically pricing that protocol based on reagent use and equipment time and a markup on that. And it is not the insane costs that you have when you have a whole team doing this work at the bench, it's just not. Like -- so if scientists really understood, just how low cost each sample could be in an experiment, and they did -- in order to do many more, they just hit a button rather than have to slave in the lab for 3 days is doing 1,000 experiments. They're going to just order those 1,000 experiments. And so I think you will see an explosion in the amount of data. And this is 100% what happened in every other field that's ever been automated, right? It's like the beginnings of the automation of computation, right? Like when we went from slide rules to automated computation and explosion in the amount of compute you use, and a massive increase in the return on investment from what people who understood how to design a computation could do. And that's what I want to do for the scientists for drug discovery leads when they have access to an autonomous lab compared to the ROI and the throughput that they can get out of manual labs. It's just going to be no comparison. So yes, I think all 3, you're going to see big gains on. And the cool thing is we're going to keep showing this on Nebula. So we just had -- Head of R&D here today, and we went through with his team and showed all the gains, and it's -- yes, it's really exciting right now. Daniel Marshall: So I think we will end on the note, kind of, related to that, which is you guys mentioned in the call, you've mentioned other places you're trying to get to 100 RACs. When do you actually expect to get there? Jason Kelly: Yes. So it's been pretty fun. We have to put behind-the-scenes videos up, but we have been installing RACs for the last 3 weeks here at Ginkgo. I just showed up on trucks RACs built by our team in Emeryville. And we just added the additional 50. They are all fully connected now in lab. I took a tour of it, it's insane. And so -- and we can run them now, like the original system is running and now the new 50 are running, and there is a connection between the two, and that connection is going to get turned on, I think on the 14th -- next week. So it is imminent. So I'm really excited to see it all come together. But we already have it up now running as 2 separate loops. So to put in 50 new pieces of equipment in 3 weeks. Again, these are just things that no one's ever done in laboratory automation. So I do think we are doing a very unique thing here at Ginkgo. That's the bet. That's certainly what I'm leaning in on the company. It's what we're investing our capital into. It's where our new customers are coming from and so if you like that idea, I think that is a really exciting time to get involved with the company in any way. But yes, we're going to be at 100 next week. 103 or 105. I got to count them, yes. Daniel Marshall: All right. And if you want to follow us on that journey, you can go to X or LinkedIn, Instagram and keep watching. We'll have a lot of content coming about the unveiling of the new full system. And as always, if you have questions, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. Thanks so much, everyone, until next time. Jason Kelly: Thanks, everybody. 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This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-08

Ginkgo Bioworks Reports First Quarter 2026 Financial Results, Completes Divestiture of Biosecurity and Continues to Scale Autonomous Lab

PR Newswire
Ginkgo provides an update on its first quarter financial results following the divestiture of its Biosecurity business BOSTON, May 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DNA, "Ginkgo") today announced its results for the first quarter of 2026 that ended March 31, 2026. The update, including a webcast slide presentation with additional details on the first quarter, as well as supplemental financial information, will be available at investors.ginkgobioworks.com. First Quarter 2026 Financial Results As previously announced, Ginkgo completed the divestiture of its Biosecurity business on April 3, 2026 and is presenting the financial results of operations for the former business within discontinued operations. Accordingly, Ginkgo's previously reported financial results for comparable periods have been retrospectively recast to conform to this presentation and reflect Ginkgo as a single reporting segment. First quarter 2026 Revenue of $19 million compared to $38 million in the comparable prior year period, a decrease of 49%. As previously reported, the first quarter of 2025 benefited from $7 million of non-cash revenue from previously announced release of deferred revenue relating to the mutual termination of a customer agreement. Excluding this non-cash deferred revenue release, first quarter 2026 Revenue of $19 million, down from $31 million in the comparable prior year period, a decrease of 37%. The decrease in revenue is primarily attributed to ongoing program rationalization as part of our restructuring activities. First quarter 2026 GAAP net loss from continuing operations of $(76) million, compared to $(83) million in the comparable prior year period. First quarter 2026 Adjusted EBITDA of $(42) million, down from $(44) million in the comparable prior year period. Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities balance as of March 31, 2026 of $373 million. "We believe autonomous labs will replace the lab bench more quickly than people think," said Jason Kelly, Co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. "Nebula is already the world's largest autonomous lab with the ability to run real customer science around the clock and we're targeting to double its size this year. We see a large market that remains overwhelmingly manual today, and every experiment our Solutions, Datapoints, and Cloud Lab businesses run on Nebula generates revenue today…Read full document

Ginkgo provides an update on its first quarter financial results following the divestiture of its Biosecurity business BOSTON, May 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DNA, "Ginkgo") today announced its results for the first quarter of 2026 that ended March 31, 2026. The update, including a webcast slide presentation with additional details on the first quarter, as well as supplemental financial information, will be available at investors.ginkgobioworks.com. First Quarter 2026 Financial Results As previously announced, Ginkgo completed the divestiture of its Biosecurity business on April 3, 2026 and is presenting the financial results of operations for the former business within discontinued operations. Accordingly, Ginkgo's previously reported financial results for comparable periods have been retrospectively recast to conform to this presentation and reflect Ginkgo as a single reporting segment. First quarter 2026 Revenue of $19 million compared to $38 million in the comparable prior year period, a decrease of 49%. As previously reported, the first quarter of 2025 benefited from $7 million of non-cash revenue from previously announced release of deferred revenue relating to the mutual termination of a customer agreement. Excluding this non-cash deferred revenue release, first quarter 2026 Revenue of $19 million, down from $31 million in the comparable prior year period, a decrease of 37%. The decrease in revenue is primarily attributed to ongoing program rationalization as part of our restructuring activities. First quarter 2026 GAAP net loss from continuing operations of $(76) million, compared to $(83) million in the comparable prior year period. First quarter 2026 Adjusted EBITDA of $(42) million, down from $(44) million in the comparable prior year period. Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities balance as of March 31, 2026 of $373 million. "We believe autonomous labs will replace the lab bench more quickly than people think," said Jason Kelly, Co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. "Nebula is already the world's largest autonomous lab with the ability to run real customer science around the clock and we're targeting to double its size this year. We see a large market that remains overwhelmingly manual today, and every experiment our Solutions, Datapoints, and Cloud Lab businesses run on Nebula generates revenue today while making the platform better for tomorrow. Ginkgo is singularly focused on leading the transition from the lab bench to autonomous research infrastructure that runs 24/7 and integrates directly with the AI models transforming drug discovery and industrial biotechnology." Recent Business Highlights & Strategic Positioning We believe that autonomous labs will replace the bench. The return on investment of the autonomous lab is clear for customers, with millions of square feet and tens of billions per year being spent on work happening at the lab bench The autonomous lab is a machine that can run 24/7 and can be seamlessly integrated into emerging AI models Nebula, our autonomous lab, is showing what is possible at the bleeding edge. Nebula is the world's largest autonomous lab and in 2026 we are aiming to double its size Recent coverage positions Ginkgo at the frontier of scientific innovation in the scientific (Nature), trade (R&D World), mainstream (Forbes, The Washington Post), and tech press (Sequoia's Training Data, TBPN) Policymakers and heads of R&D visit for our internal demonstrations. During SLAS 2026, over 500 visitors came to tour Nebula Cloud Lab, Datapoints, and Solutions are our version of Starlink. They both create revenue and speed the development of the autonomous lab We are seeing traction with our Cloud Lab from partners such as ProQR and Amazon, who included us as an integrated wet lab partner on their Amazon Bio Discovery platform Full Year 2026 Outlook Ginkgo reaffirms expected total cash burn of $(150)-$(125) million in 2026. Conference Call Details Ginkgo will host a videoconference today, Thursday, May 7, beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET. The presentation will include an overview of the first quarter 2026, recent business updates, a discussion on Ginkgo's outlook, as well as a moderated question and answer session. To ask a question ahead of the presentation, please submit your questions to @Ginkgo on X (hashtag #GinkgoResults) or by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. A webcast link is available on Ginkgo's Investor Relations website and a replay will be made available following the presentation. Ginkgo Investor Website: https://investors.ginkgobioworks.com/events/ Audio-Only Dial Ins: +1 646 876 9923 (New York - ET) +1 301 715 8592 (Washington DC - ET) +1 305 224 1968 (Miami - ET) +1 689 278 1000 (Orlando - ET) +1 312 626 6799 (Chicago - CT) +1 507 473 4847 (Minnesota - CT) +1 346 248 7799 (Houston - CT) +1 719 359 4580 (Colorado - MT) +1 408 638 0968 (San Jose - PT) +1 564 217 2000 (Seattle - PT) Webinar ID: 931 5925 7666 If you experience technical difficulties with any of these dial-ins or if you need international dial-in numbers, please visit our website at https://investors.ginkgobioworks.com/events/ for updated dial-in information. About Ginkgo Bioworks Ginkgo Bioworks builds the tools that make biology easier to engineer for everyone. The company offers autonomous laboratories that replace manual laboratory work with robotics in the lab, greatly improving the productivity of scientists. Ginkgo's in-house autonomous lab is also available as a "Cloud Lab" through our Datapoints and Solutions contract research services. For more information, visit ginkgobioworks.com, read our blog, or follow us on social media channels such as X (@Ginkgo), Instagram (@GinkgoBioworks), Threads (@GinkgoBioworks), or LinkedIn. Forward-Looking Statements of Ginkgo Bioworks This press release, the presentation, and the conference call and webcast contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding our plans, including with respect to technology adaptations to meet our customers' needs and the integration of our autonomous lab platform with third-party artificial intelligence models, strategies, including with respect to our current expectations, operations and anticipated results of operations, both business and financial, including the timing for attaining Adjusted EBITDA breakeven, potential customer success, including successful application of our offerings by our customers, expected benefits from our strategic partnerships and collaborations (including with named partners such as ProQR and Amazon), the anticipated growth, scaling, capacity, capabilities and competitive position of our autonomous lab (including Nebula) and of our Cloud Lab, Datapoints and Solutions offerings, our beliefs and estimates regarding the size, composition, growth and pace of adoption of the market for autonomous laboratory and related services (including the displacement of manual laboratory work), expectations regarding the development, performance and future enhancements of our platform, and expectations with regard to revenue, including our ability to meet all milestones and achieve the maximum revenue available under certain of our customer arrangements, expenses, our full year 2026 outlook including the total cash burn guidance, and the market environment, all of which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, market trends, or industry results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements generally are identified by the words "believe," "can," "project," "potential," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "intend," "strategy," "future," "opportunity," "plan," "may," "should," "will," "would," "will be," "will continue," "will likely result," "target," "goal," "aim," "design," "forecast," "outlook," "guidance," "seek" "position," and similar expressions, as well as the negatives of such terms. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this document, including but not limited to: (i) our ability to realize near-term and long-term cost savings associated with our site consolidation plans, including the ability to terminate leases or find sub-lease tenants for unused facilities, (ii) volatility in the price of Ginkgo's securities due to a variety of factors, including changes in the competitive and highly regulated industries in which Ginkgo operates and plans to operate, variations in performance across competitors, and changes in laws and regulations affecting Ginkgo's business, (iii) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts, and other expectations, and to identify and realize additional business opportunities, including with respect to our solutions and tools offerings, (iv) the risk of downturns in demand for products using synthetic biology, (v) the uncertainty regarding the demand for passive monitoring programs and biosecurity services, (vi) changes to the biosecurity industry, including due to advancements in technology, emerging competition and evolution in industry demands, standards and regulations, (vii) the outcome of any pending or potential legal proceedings against Ginkgo, (viii) our ability to realize the expected benefits from and the success of our platform programs and assets, (ix) our ability to successfully develop engineered cells, bioprocesses, data packages or other deliverables, (x) the product development, production or manufacturing success of our customers, (xi) our exposure to the volatility and liquidity risks inherent in holding equity interests in other operating companies and other non-cash consideration we may receive for our services, (xii) the potential negative impact on our business of our restructuring or the failure to realize the anticipated savings associated therewith, (xiii) the uncertainty regarding government budgetary priorities and funding allocated to government agencies, including potential adverse effects from the U.S. government shutdown, (xiv) our ability to scale, expand the capacity of, and continue to develop the capabilities of our autonomous lab (including Nebula) on the timelines and to the extent we anticipate, (xv) the pace and degree to which autonomous laboratory infrastructure is adopted by, and displaces manual laboratory work in, the broader life sciences and industrial biotechnology markets, (xvi) the actual size, composition and growth of the addressable markets we target, which may differ materially from our estimates, (xvii) our ability to integrate our autonomous lab platform with third-party artificial intelligence models and other technologies, and the rate of development and adoption of such technologies, and (xviii) our ability to maintain and expand strategic partnerships and customer relationships, including those with named partners referenced in this release. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the "Risk Factors" section of Ginkgo's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on February 26, 2026 and other documents filed by Ginkgo from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Ginkgo assumes no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Ginkgo does not give any assurance that it will achieve its expectations. Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures Certain of the financial measures included in this release, including Adjusted EBITDA, cash flow and cash burn, have not been prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP"), and constitute "non-GAAP financial measures" as defined by the SEC. Ginkgo has included these non-GAAP financial measures because it believes they provide an additional tool for investors to use in evaluating Ginkgo's financial performance and prospects. Due to the nature and/or size of the items being excluded, such items do not reflect future gains, losses, expenses or benefits and are not indicative of our future operating performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are supplemental to, and should not be considered in isolation from, or as an alternative to, financial measures determined in accordance with GAAP. In addition, these non-GAAP financial measures may differ from non-GAAP financial measures with comparable names used by other companies. See the reconciliation below for additional information regarding certain of the non-GAAP financial measures included in this release, including a description of these non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of the historic measures to Ginkgo's most comparable GAAP financial measures. 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TranscriptFY2026 Q12026-05-07

FY2026 Q1 earnings call transcript

Earnings source - 84 paragraphs
Jason Kelly

Thanks, Daniel. We always start with this, Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. I mentioned this at the last earnings call, but in 2026, our focus will be on investing to win the category of autonomous labs. I'm really excited, even since we just spoke a few months ago, this category has really been growing in attention, new companies in Silicon Valley pursuing this, a lot of interest from the AI frontier labs about the application of AI models in science via autonomous labs, government talking more about this. I do think we're onto the right track with this focus for the company. The two big ways I'm gonna be pursuing that goal in 2026.

Jason Kelly

The first is to take our services, in solutions, in data points, in cloud lab, and run them on top of our autonomous lab here in Boston that we call Nebula. That's a chance to prove out the capabilities of our system with real-world activities. The second big area of activity will be getting early adopters of autonomous labs out in the world to buy our systems like we've done already with Pacific Northwest National Labs that I talked about last time. Excited to pursue both of those, and you're gonna hear more about it from me in the strategic section. We also in the last quarter, were able to close on a deal I talked about extensively last time, which is the spin-off of our biosecurity unit into a new company called Perimeter.

Jason Kelly

I wanna say congratulations to the team at Biosecurity at Ginkgo in pulling that off. $60 million and a lot of great new investors coming into that focus really firmly in the area of defense tech and building sort of a Biosecurity prime. Ginkgo as a shareholder in that company, we're super excited to see it succeed. I think this is a really nice, as I talked about last time, opportunity both for Ginkgo to keep our focus on the autonomous labs and for the team at Perimeter to grow under their own brand with a new set of defense tech-focused investors. Our focus over the last couple of years was very much on getting these numbers where they are today, bringing down our cash burn in the company.

Jason Kelly

We guided towards this, and Steve will touch on that in his section. Again, happy to have a very strong cash position, $373 million with no bank debt, as of Q1 2026. You'll hear a little bit more from Steve on this. This sets us up very nicely. We're well capitalized to pursue this area of autonomous labs. We have these base service businesses to build on top of and the lead in developing the technology. You put all that together, and I think we're by far the best best bet in this sector. All right. I'm gonna pass it on to Steve to dig into the financials.

Steve Coen

Thanks, Jason. Before I walk through our financials, I want to take a moment to frame an important change in how we are presenting our results beginning in Q1, 2026. As we announced in February, we entered into a definitive agreement to sell our biosecurity business, which was previously reported as a separate segment. As Jason noted, we closed that transaction on April third. The biosecurity transferred assets met the criteria under U.S. accounting to be classified as Held for Sale and the financial results reported as Discontinued Operations as of March thirty-first, 2026. This is the first quarter in which biosecurity is reflected as Discontinued Operations within our financial statements. In accordance with the accounting rules, we have and will retrospectively recast all prior periods presented to conform to this presentation.

Steve Coen

That means the revenue, operating expenses, and cash flows previously attributed to the biosecurity business are removed from each line item of our continuing operations and cash flows as the prior period information is presented, including for Q1 of last year. The former biosecurity results are now reported as a single net line loss from discontinued operations below loss from continuing operations. To be clear, all of the financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations. We will not be discussing the biosecurity business further in our prepared remarks. On April 7, 2026, for your information, we filed a current report on Form 8-K that includes pro forma financial information for fiscal years 2023, 2024, and 2025 on a continuing operations basis. Following the biosecurity divestiture, we now operate as a single segment. With that, I'll now discuss our Q1 results.

Steve Coen

Revenue was $19 million in the first quarter of 2026, down 49% compared to the first quarter of 2025. As previously disclosed, revenue in the first quarter of 2025 included $7.5 million in non-cash revenue relating to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding this, revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was down 37% from the prior year period. It is important to note that our net loss includes a number of non-cash and other non-recurring items as detailed more fully in our financial statements. Because of these non-cash and other non-recurring items, we believe adjusted EBITDA is a more indicative measure of our profitability. A full reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and GAAP net loss from continuing operations can be found in the appendix.

Steve Coen

In the first quarter of 2026, R&D expense decreased 38% from $49 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $30 million in the first quarter of 2026. G&A expense decreased 35% from $20 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $13 million in the first quarter of 2026. These decreases were all driven by our restructuring efforts. Net loss from continuing operations was $76 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to a loss of $83 million in the prior year period.

Steve Coen

The reduction in loss year-over-year was due to our restructuring efforts. Moving further down the page, you'll note that adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2026 was negative $42 million, which was down from negative $44 million in the first quarter of 2025. Since we are now only operating in a single segment, we only present a single measure of adjusted EBITDA. It is important to note that adjusted EBITDA includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which you can see was $16 million in the first quarter of 2026. Previously, this cost would not have been included in the former presentation of segment adjusted EBITDA. This cost represents the base rent and other charges relating to lease space which we are not occupying, net of sublease income.

Steve Coen

This is a cash operating cost that is not related to driving revenue right now and can be potentially mitigated through subleasing. Finally, cash burn in the first quarter of 2026 was $48 million, down from $58 million in the first quarter of 2025, a 17% decrease. As previously reported, in October 2025, we amended and reset the annual commitments with Google Cloud for $14 million. Resetting the commitment reduced our future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms, and extended the commitment term from 3 to 6 years. We paid this $14 million in Q1 of 2026, which is reflected in our cash burn for the quarter.

Steve Coen

Excluding the payment to Google Cloud, cash burn reflects a significant decrease in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025, which was a direct result of the restructuring. Turning to guidance. As we discussed in February, 2026 is about continuing to be cost-efficient while investing in our AI robotics and software to bring autonomous labs to our bioscience customers, including the build-out of our frontier autonomous lab in Boston. We have turned the page on our pure focus on restructuring actions to focus this year not only on cost efficiency, but on investing in what we see as our opportunities while continuing to provide our customers the advanced services that they have come to expect. For these reasons, we believe cash burn best reflects our continuing services and tools and further investments in autonomous labs.

Steve Coen

In terms of outlook for the full year, we are reaffirming our overall cash burn guidance for 2026, totaling $125 million-$150 million. This range reflects a firm balance amongst cost efficiency, continuing services and tools, and further investments we are making. In conclusion, we are pleased with our continued improvements in cash burn efficiency and our business pursuits for 2026. With that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jason.

Jason Kelly

Thanks, Steve. I'm gonna dive in on the strategic section. I'm excited to go into this today. Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. The way we're really aiming, to solve that problem, we believe the bottleneck fundamentally is the laboratory work associated with bioengineering. I'm gonna dig deep today and talk about why autonomous labs will be replacing the lab bench. I wanna highlight, some of what we're doing with Nebula, our system, 'cause we have, some news this month, in terms of expanding that system. Finally, the services that we put on top of Nebula are Cloud Lab, Datapoints, and Solutions. These are sort of like, we call it like our Starlink, right?

Jason Kelly

If you think about SpaceX, 70% of the launches last year were actually Starlink, their own internal product. In the coming year, the ability for us to scale up an autonomous lab and showcase that you can make money on services without having people in the middle of a lab doing those laboratory services, I think is a real highlight and will help drive sales of our systems into the world. I'm gonna talk about all three, and let's dive in. Okay. I gave this analogy. I'm gonna do it again 'cause I think this is, for new folks listening on the call, it's worth understanding what we say when we say "autonomous lab" as distinct from traditional lab automation. I'm gonna give an analogy from the transportation industry.

Jason Kelly

On the Y-axis here, we have the amount of automation for a certain type of transport. On the X-axis, the request flexibility. In other words, the user's asking the transportation system to do something different, or not. For a low request flexibility and a high level of automation, that's your subway, right? It's the Red Line here in Boston. You sit down in the subway, and it takes you away. You don't have to do anything. It is high level of automation, totally automated transport, but it is very inflexible. You have to wanna go to 1 of the stops on the Red Line. Low amount of automation, high amount of flexibility, that's a car, right?

Jason Kelly

You get your hands on the wheel, your foot on the pedals, it'll take you right to your house or to the grocery store or anywhere you want to go. That's roughly what the transportation system has looked like for the last 100 years. Unless, go to the next slide, you've been to California in the last 4 or 5 years, or now L.A. or Austin or soon in Boston, and you've sat in the back seat of a Waymo, and it is amazing. It is like sitting on a subway. You don't have to do anything, it'll take you right to your house. It has the flexibility of a car. It's those two things together that sort of flexibility plus a high level of automation that mean we actually give it a new name.

Jason Kelly

We don't call it an automated car. We call it an autonomous car because up till now, you've needed a human being with our brain in the loop in order to manage that amount of flexibility into the system. If you look at the next slide, you'll see the miles traveled by cars and trucks versus subways and trains in the U.S. It's more than 99% in cars and trucks. That's not because we don't know about subways. It's that we need that flexibility to do our day-to-day lives, it's required for the transportation that humans need. Now let's go into the lab bench and into the lab. Low amount of flexibility, high amount of automation. We have actually automation in the lab. It's called a workcell.

Jason Kelly

That's a 3D schematic of a workcell we have here at Ginkgo. Companies like HighRes and Thermo and Biosero make these. They're like a subway, right? They're great. They're fully automated. They'll do an experiment without a scientist in the loop, it better be the experiment that you ordered yesterday. It's not gonna do a new experiment for you today. Low amount of automation, high amount of flexibility. We have those two in the lab. It's called the lab bench. You as a scientist are basically the human glue connecting all of these different devices in the lab together to do whatever protocol you wanna do. Again, here's the kicker.

Jason Kelly

If you look at research budgets between laboratory workcells, which are used in things in pharma companies like high-throughput screening or combinatorial chemistry or things like that, versus at the lab bench, it's about 95% plus at the bench. Again, it's not like we don't know about workcells. It's that scientists need flexibility to explore all the different hypotheses they have for discovering a new drug or developing a new crop trait or whatever type of biotechnology they're doing. This is what we're trying to build at Ginkgo. We're trying to get up to that top right corner and make a Waymo. We're trying to make an autonomous lab that has the flexibility of the bench, so scientists can order whatever experiment they want, but the automation of a workcell.

Jason Kelly

In other words, they don't have to be there to do each and every step and move the samples among the different equipment and program the equipment. They can just hit go and have that protocol run end to end for them via the automation, but whatever they wanna order that day. That's the target. Look, if you go to the next slide, the value prop here I think is very clear for getting rid of the lab bench. Massive overhead cost savings. We've heard a lot about overhead costs at academic research labs and things like that. That's really paying for ultimately millions of square feet of laboratory space. There's 50 million square feet of laboratory space just in the Boston area. You can dramatically reduce that.

Jason Kelly

You can increase the research productivity of your human scientists as we need more data from AI, and we'll talk about that in a minute. We can enable AI scientists to run these lab-in-the-loop experiments. We just announced a project with OpenAI a few months ago where GPT-5 ran our lab. That's that kind of lab-in-the-loop experiments that we're seeing increasingly also in the biopharma industry. To put a point on it, like a typical large pharma, biopharma, biotech spends $1 billion-$3 billion a year on research. Not clinical trials, spending on, you know, 1 million+ sq ft of lab benches. If you look at their spending within that or on automation, it's well below $100 million, usually much less. Frankly, I think those numbers should flip.

Jason Kelly

I think really the majority of the capital should be going towards automated laboratory work, rather than manual benches. The reason for that is, I think, a relatively straightforward calculation. On the next slide, you can see a comparison between a traditional manual lab and an autonomous lab. It's about a threefold space improvement when you take this equipment that's often very spread out in a normal human-operated lab 'cause people need to get around it and safety reasons and all these things. In an autonomous lab, you can jam all that equipment right next to each other, about as tight as you can make it for the arms to work and things like that. It's about a threefold space reduction. Then the manual labs really are just run 40 hours a week, right?

Jason Kelly

I mean, it's when people come into the lab and humans are there and they gotta be there, and that's when you can get people to work. There's now almost never multiple shifts in these types of sorta high-end research labs. It's really a 40-hour work week. Our system here in Nebula is running 168 hours a week. You know, 24/7, that's a fourfold improvement in sort of hours available for utilization of your laboratory. I think a real clear threefold, fourfold on 2 different axes. It is a clear value driver. If you go to the next slide. I think there's little question the ROI is there. I think the big question with autonomous labs is a technical one.

Jason Kelly

It's how do you get that high level of automation and the high level of flexibility, that top right corner, without a human being in the loop, right? It's the same question of the Waymo. How do you get it to navigate all these different environments and different roads without a human in the loop? If you can do it's an obvious win. If we can do this in the lab, it's an obvious win. All right, let me talk through a little bit the design constraints that we focused on at Ginkgo. On the next slide, you can see, you know, a workcell, one of those subways. The way it's designed is it's designed against a particular protocol.

Jason Kelly

If you're a biopharma company and you wanna build a high-throughput screening workcell and you call a traditional automation vendor, the first question they're gonna ask you is, "Tell me about your protocol and tell me what throughput you need it run at. How many samples do you wanna get through every week?" 'Cause they're building you a subway line. It's gonna be built to do that protocol for you. If you're a, you know, a new facility head who is opening a lab in Central Square or, you know, in Kendall Square here in Cambridge, and you are building it for a scientific lead, you don't ask that scientific lead, "Hey, what's the protocol you're gonna run in this lab that 30 of your scientists are gonna use to do work?" You say, "What kind of science are you doing?

Jason Kelly

Very specifically, what equipment do you want me to install in that lab so that your scientists can be productive over the next 3 to 5 years as they use the lab?" So it is oriented around the equipment rather than the protocol. That's a sort of a subtle point, but it has a huge amount of consequences when it comes to how you design the hardware and software that responds to this challenge. If you go to the next slide, you can see our hardware solution here is what we call our RAC carts, our reconfigurable automation carts. It's basically a robot wrapped around each laboratory device, and we have control over that environment. There's a HEPA filter on the top, which is important for a lot of biological work, where you have opportunities for contamination and things like that.

Jason Kelly

We have a six-axis robotic arm and a piece of MagneMotion track that allows you to, if you go to the next slide, Lego block these together into ultimately very large setups. We're at 50 plus right now in the lab, and it's growing quickly. I'll show you some photos in a second. We have 103 racks will be coming online just in about a week, all in 1 big setup here in Boston. If you go to the next slide, I wanna show. This is actually a video of the OpenAI protocol. We did this project with OpenAI, where GPT-5 controlled the lab, and we made a video of 1 of the samples just moving through the various racks for that protocol.

Jason Kelly

This just gives you a sense of, like, how does it work, right? You have these tracks, and we're able to move, like, our one sort of constraint on the system is that we pass things in what's called SBS format. That little rectangle you saw there is, like, a three-by-five-inch square, rectangle, and it can contain a 96, or this is a 384-well plate or 1,586-well plate. It can also carry consumables like tips and other things. The arm picks up that piece of plastic ware or samples or tips or whatever it might be, and then puts it onto a particular device. In this case, it's going, you know, just went through an acoustic liquid handler. Now it's going onto a Bravo liquid handler.

Jason Kelly

You saw, that 1st thing that got put down there was actually the plastic tips that are now getting picked up by the liquid handler. The other 2 plates are sort of sample and destination plates. We're, in this case, for the OpenAI project, we're picking up some synthetic DNA, and we're putting it into reaction mixes that were designed by the GPT-5 model at the time, right? Again, key feature here is any device that accepts those SBS plates, we can integrate into the racks. It takes us usually, like, a month to month and a half if it's a new device. We've now got 80-plus devices on there. We're adding new devices all the time. If a customer asks us for 1, if we wanna add 1 to Nebula, we just bring it online.

Jason Kelly

Now that plate's going to get shaken up and put onto ultimately this thermocycle or this final analytical device to run the qPCR reactions and give a readout on the performance of each one of those samples back to, in this case, an AI model. That data from most of the runs on Nebula is going back to a human scientist as opposed to an AI scientist. We expect there will be a mix of both as science goes forward. We will have both scientists and their agents ordering experiments on autonomous labs. Go to the next slide. A great thing about this system is it can expand.

Jason Kelly

You know, we started Nebula, I think, with about 8 racks doing NGS, like, next-generation sequencing prep for our samples here at Ginkgo and expanded ultimately, now up to over 100 racks on the system. Let's dig in a little bit. I wanna go in the next section. That, that was sort of the theory, you know, like how we designed the hardware in order to solve some of the challenges of the autonomous lab and what autonomy means. Now I wanna dig in a little bit on Nebula specifically, because I think what's really unique about Ginkgo is we're not just a hardware company. We actually run BSL-2 labs here in Boston and do scientific partnerships with some of the largest biotech, ag biotech, industrial biotech companies in the world.

Jason Kelly

We can actually show what it looks like to do real science on a system like this. If you go to the next slide, one of the things I'm quite proud of that we've been able to show in the last quarter is over 100 protocols with more than 30 of them being unique, submitted by scientists. I'll mention this, but these are not being submitted by automation engineers or experts in robotics, being submitted onto our system, Nebula, here in Boston, which has 50-plus lab devices all integrated together, where you can send point-to-point samples from any device to any other device as requested by those scientists.

Jason Kelly

There is nothing else like Nebula in the world today doing sort of open-ended science like this at this scale, with this number of unique protocols and users. It's proof that autonomous labs are feasible. I mean, there's work to do and talk about that. Things break as we are scaling this up, that's for sure. It is evidence, in my view that this is, this is gonna land. Like, we are gonna be the manually operated lab.

Jason Kelly

If you go to the next slide, I wanna walk through a few of the key things that you gotta show if you're gonna take out, you know, one of those laboratory floors at Takeda or Merck or Novartis or wherever or Bayer Crop Science or any of these companies that do a lot of laboratory work. First, you wanna connect 100 plus devices in a single automation setup. All right? It can't just be 5 or 10. You know, a scientist expects to have access to many different devices in order to do whatever protocol they might read about in a scientific paper, you know, this week. And that, I think about 100 is the right number. We've been able to this week, we'll find out. We're turning it on in about 5 days.

Jason Kelly

105, or 103 RACs all in one big setup. The reason we can do that is because of that RAC productized hardware, that cart I showed you. We just rolled in, you know, they came in off a truck, and we rolled another 50 in, and those have all gone in the actual install over the last three or four weeks. It's pretty fast to put that many new devices on a, on an automated setup. We'll see if it works. Second, we have run 10 now, like I said, 30-plus unique protocols, 100-plus different, 100-plus total protocols. That's, you gotta get in that, I think, 50 to 100 to maybe 200 unique protocols all running on the autonomous lab at the same time.

Jason Kelly

We do that with our Catalyst. This is our software. Our scheduler that we built. This is a very complicated scheduling problem. It is really easy to mess this up. Biology is very sensitive to timing. Things break all the time as we keep driving the scale up here. We are getting to do that quick cycle of debugging and improving the system. That scheduler is really the key piece of software driving that. Finally, scientists, not automation engineers, I think on a peak day on Nebula, we had 439 or so scientists submitting. That is really exciting. Like, to have that many different scientists submitting protocols on one automation system, again, I do not know of any automation system in the world that has been able to do that before.

Jason Kelly

We're able to do that in part by leveraging AI coding tools with custom harnesses wrapped around them that basically understand how to transfer a scientist's intent in human language into code to operate the autonomous lab. That is a big unlock. We're very thankful for what's going on with all the coding agents. That's a real help for improving the ease of use because at the end of the day, to make robots do something, you have to program them. To walk up to a lab bench and do your work by hand, you don't.

Jason Kelly

We have to solve this problem of we can't make it so that scientists have to become coders to do their job, and we've really just been given a gift by these AI coding tools, again, like the Codexes and the Claude Code and things like that can sit inside other tools that are specific to the automation to get this done. Those are the three big ones, and I'm pretty happy with the progress on all of them. If you go to the next slide, as I've mentioned several times now, we're going from 50 to 105 RACs by the end of this month.

Jason Kelly

It's gonna be awesome. It's a really cool system to see. People should come out and visit it. If you go to the next slide, that scheduler is not trivial. This is an example of our scheduler, I think, running 17 or 20 different protocols at the same time. Each color is a different protocol. Each row is a different device on the system. The X-axis is time.

Jason Kelly

You can imagine if you wanna add a new protocol to that and you're like, Okay, I need to use the device on row 3, the device on row 7, and the device on row 9, and I need the device on row 3 for the first 3 minutes, then I'm willing to tolerate a up to 1-hour gap, then the second device for 15 minutes, then up to a 30-minute gap, then the last device, it'll check can it fit you in, and if it can fit you in, or if it can fit you in by moving a couple other things that doesn't disrupt them in a way that breaks the protocol, it'll fit you in. That's awesome, right. That's very, very much not how the traditional lab automation, the subways work. They're running a batch.

Jason Kelly

That subway line is showing up at a certain time. You can't just jump and insert yourself in the middle, but you can with our scheduling software here. The next slide, the little green one, it's hard to see, but that column, third column over from the left over there, has the names of all the different scientists submitting. I really love this. I love that we're seeing different people submitting different orders for protocols every day. It's really exciting. Again, I think it's unique. We're also seeing a lot of energy on the U.S. government side. If you go to the next slide, a lot of new policy action here. There's the Genesis Mission, which we're fortunate to be a part of from the White House to bring AI into the national labs.

Jason Kelly

You know, there's a big motion right now where we're seeing an increasing amount of drug discovery work moving to China, from Kendall Square, I was talking about earlier, here in the Boston area. That's because simply Chinese scientists are paid a third as much. They're doing equal work to what's happening here in the U.S. Like they're, you know, they're just as good, they're just as smart. I think if we want to remain competitive, we gotta think about doing our research in a fundamentally different way in the United States.

Jason Kelly

I don't think we can just rest on our laurels of having the only smart scientists in the world in this area or at least versus China. I think that era is over, firmly over at this point. We gotta think about a new way to do it. I'm pretty heartened to see activity out of, you know, the National Science Foundation is funding $100 million for a network of cloud laboratories and autonomous labs. There's a new bill introduced by Senator Young to sort of do more of this, cloud labs and autonomous labs. Hopefully we see more here, but I'm encouraged by what we see already. If you go to the next slide, we're obviously very fortunate.

Jason Kelly

I had a chance in December to sort of ribbon cut the first 18 of our RACs going in at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and signed a new contract for a $47 million much larger autonomous lab setup, nearly 100 RACs going in a new building in a couple of years at PNNL. This is really exciting and I think sort of highlights the direction I believe our national labs will go, our scientific research in the country. If you go to the next slide, we were lucky to give ARPA-H a tour of Nebula. We have a great project with them. You know, the work is accelerated by having these autonomous labs available to our scientists at Ginkgo.

Jason Kelly

I think this is something that makes a lot of sense for a lot of labs at the National Institutes of Health, for example, or NSF-funded labs or academic research universities. They would all be accelerated if our scientific talent could get many more of their hypotheses tested than are today due to the limitation of the manual lab. Next slide. Listen, Nebula is showcasing what is possible, and that means that early adopters are getting excited about it. We are also building autonomous labs for that left end of the chart here, the very earliest adopters, the people that are excited to try this out as a different way, as an alternative to their lab benches. We'll keep leaning in there, building those systems as that demand comes in.

Jason Kelly

We are seeing, if you go to the next slide, a lot of interest. We've had, you know, 600 plus visitors in the first quarter. I'll show it at the end. We have a great, like a little sign-up. We do tours weekly if any of you wanna sign up who are listening in. We're very happy to give you a tour. Okay. That's Nebula, and that's the dive on that. All right. Now I wanna talk a little bit about our service businesses, cloud labs, data points, and solutions, which I think of a little bit like I said, like our Starlink, right? Last year, 70% of the, you know, launches at SpaceX were Starlink. If you go to the next slide. That's a huge advantage for SpaceX.

Jason Kelly

That means they get to be creating an asset, a money-making asset in the form of Starlink, while also getting to test over and over and over again their launch platform. Their launch platform ultimately, I think in their view, is the big product, right? That they can have that sort of transportation layer to space. Today, they're 70% of the demand for that platform, right? I see a similar situation with the autonomous lab. We are able to have a big system here in Boston and basically prove out moving over our work from Ginkgo Datapoints, Ginkgo Cloud Lab Solutions, even our reagents business onto that platform. If you go to the next slide, I'm really excited we got our Cloud Lab off the ground just in the last quarter. It's really been exciting.

Jason Kelly

This is from The Times. "Do you wanna run an experiment for $39? Robots will do it for you." Go check out cloud.ginkgo.bio. You can go in the estimate tab at the top, type in whatever protocol you're interested in. It'll look up and see do we have the equipment needed to do your protocol, and if so, it'll make an estimate of what the price would be to run that protocol in a cloud lab. People are, I think, pretty surprised at how inexpensive it can be, and that is a reflection of where all the costs lie in doing lab work, which is in manual lab work done 40 hours a week, done at low equipment density, low equipment utilization in laboratories that cost a fortune to run.

Jason Kelly

That then flows through, it means all of the CRO services you order and so on are very expensive. We think we can solve that problem through automation and the cloud.ginkgo.bio, our Ginkgo Cloud Lab service is really a great way to do that. If you go to the next slide, this is what OpenAI took advantage of when we did this project where GPT-5 ran the lab. We had an awesome result. Back in February, we showed that after 6 rounds of design, we had improved the cost of cell-free protein synthesis by 40% over scientific state-of-the-art. That opened a lot of eyes. I think people weren't really, we didn't know ahead of time whether the models would even be able to design experiments and interpret data at this level of sophistication.

Jason Kelly

Really excited about that. Really excited about future work we're gonna be doing to keep proving this out with OpenAI. It's a neat line of work. I would say it's distinct from the autonomous lab. I'd call this really an AI scientist using the autonomous lab, you know, using a cloud lab to get its work done. It is also really an important thing to watch if you're following kind of how AI is changing science. On the next slide. Also excited, just in the last quarter, three new channels coming to our deliver business to our cloud lab and Ginkgo Datapoints service. Amazon Bio Discovery got launched by AWS, which is basically a platform to allow you to design antibodies. All three of these are sort of in the antibody space.

Jason Kelly

Benchling, similarly, and then, Tamarind Bio. These are Tamarind and Amazon are sort of ways for pharma companies to access these frontier bio models. If you think of things like AlphaFold, which got the Nobel Prize for Demis at Google, those that was like one of the earliest protein design models. There's many more now. They're computationally intensive, they're interesting, and they help drug discovery scientists come up with a design for an antibody or a protein for their drug. You gotta test it, right? Like, we don't know if these things work in biology unless you go into the lab.

Jason Kelly

The idea is, could you have these layers where you access the latest models and all the compute to power them, then when you're ready to do your experiment, you hit a button and it kicks the designs to a cloud lab to do it for you, and the data flows back very nicely, well-packaged, right to the model, and you can run that loop as many times as you want. That's sort of what's going on with Amazon and Tamarind, then Benchling is really the leader in electronic lab notebooks. It's a similar idea. If you're in your ELN as a scientist and you've designed this experiment, could you ultimately hit go and kick it off to a cloud lab? We partnered there with our Datapoints service again around antibodies. Super exciting to see these.

Jason Kelly

I think this is like early indications of a way that could become a norm for how scientists do their work in the future and kind of order their laboratory experiments. Okay. I'll just say a couple more quick things about data points. Really excited by the progress here, working with, you know, 10 of the top biopharma companies in the world just in the first year of running it. It's a good mix of pharma and government and even tech companies and tech bio companies. We've done a nice job, on the next slide, of really being a community leader here. We're running competitions. There's the Virtual Cell Pharmacology Initiative where we'll actually test compounds for free. People should definitely check that out if you're in the small molecule drug discovery space.

Jason Kelly

Really neat opportunities, and we host these summits and things like that. It's been good. I think AI as applied to the design of drugs, is a big area, and with Datapoints, we're sort of operating almost like a Scale AI, like creating those just big data packages that train the models. All right, next slide. We have had a long-standing business in Solutions. We have more than 250 of these research partnerships over the last 10 years. It's gotten us to work with the R&D groups of some of the largest companies in pharmaceuticals, industrial biotech, and agricultural biotech.

Jason Kelly

Uniquely at Ginkgo, it is a huge range of different kinds of research, from, you know, microbes associated with the roots of corn and trying to engineer them to produce fertilizer to mRNA therapeutics or antibody development in pharmaceuticals to enzymes for industrial biotech. Really wide range of different types of genetic engineering and biotech lab work that has happened at Ginkgo in sort of a not totally automated way. In other words, not like no people in the lab, but like semi-automated. A human interacting with a liquid handling robot and a human interacting with various benchtop devices that can, you know, take a lot of samples at once. We were sort of like not all the way to an autonomous lab, but we were doing a lot of variable work over the years in semi-automated setups.

Jason Kelly

If you go to the next slide, I'm most excited to move this kind of work onto Nebula. It is the hardest work to move, right? This is the stuff that really is that car I mentioned earlier, the lab bench. It is totally variable. It is really different. It is not just doing the same experiment over and over again like you would at a traditional CRO. If you go remember my slide, it is where 95% of the spending is going at all of our customers. They, you know, they spend a bit with us, but they mostly spend on huge internal research labs to do this kind of work. If we want to replace the manual lab bench, migrating the work from our solutions business onto Nebula is a really critical demonstration. I'm excited about the progress there.

Jason Kelly

We're trying to share that publicly. Vignettes, we bring people through. If you go to the next slide. One of the best things we do is we bring people through, show them the lab, let them talk to our scientists, see how scientists are submitting new protocols every day, and this has been really exciting to bring research leaders from You know, I've had, I don't know, three heads of pharma or ag R&D come through to visit just this year, right? To see the system. If you just wanna visit, there's the link. You really should come by.

Jason Kelly

I think Nebula and our services on top of it is a truly unique asset to demonstrate what we think fundamentally is a better way to do biotech R&D, and we would love to get it in at every company out there and replace their benches. Go to the next slide. That is the world that I wanna see. Please, if you're interested, you can email me at [email protected]. Happy to follow up and happy to take your questions now. Thank you.

Daniel Marshall

Great. Thanks, Jason. As usual, I'll start with a question from the public and remind the analysts on the line that if you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hands on Zoom, and I'll call on you and open up your line. Thanks, everyone. All right. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Just a reminder to the analysts on the line, if you have a question, feel free to raise your hand and I'll call on you. We have one to start off submitted from Brendan at TD, we got over email. He has 2 questions. The first one is: How should we think about the potential impact to revenues this year from the AWS and Benchling announcements? How have the launches gone thus far, and what is baked into your assumptions for the rest of 2026 for these new platforms?

Jason Kelly

Yeah, I can take that one. Yes, we talked about AWS Benchling, the other one in that same category is the Tamarind Bio partnership as well. I'm super excited about these. I mean, this is the first time I've seen this sort of kind of like cloud layer talking directly to labs as a sales channel, I'm excited to see where it goes. It is definitely new, right? We're not like seeing a flood of inbound there. We are seeing some people reaching out to us because of the channel. That's exciting. I'm most excited that, you know, it's starting around antibodies, right? That's just kind of naturally there's a number of these AI models associated with antibodies and so on, because there's a few different providers that'll do these antibody services for you.

Jason Kelly

What I'm most excited about is with our cloud lab, we're not limited to test an antibody binding, right? If you look already on the, I don't know, 8 or 9, 10 protocols we've posted, and we're posting a new one every week. It's a pretty wide variety of stuff. We're doing mass spec, metabolomics, all kinds of things. So you can come and ask for a protocol on Ginkgo Cloud Lab, we'll add it. I'd love that to turn into a channel straight from an electronic lab notebook or whatever, where a scientist is like, "This is the protocol I want. Price it." You get a price back from, you know, cloud.ginkgo.bio, and then you go run your experiment.

Jason Kelly

I think that feels a lot closer to AWS and sort of like what we saw as successful with cloud compute than where these are today, which is really much more just in a more narrow lane around antibodies, which I think is an exciting place to start. I am super excited to fan that out. I think that then it could become really quite an interesting channel and something that scientists just don't have access to today. You know, at the end of the day, you can't get custom stuff done. I think that's what I'm most excited about there.

Daniel Marshall

All right, next question from Brendan. What are you hearing on Ginkgo Datapoints and the collective AI-driven offerings with Ginkgo as especially attractive for customers as biotech and pharma companies continue to roll out their own AI capabilities? In other words, what kind of demand dynamics are you seeing here? Are there any potential revenue funnel unlocks we should watch for over the coming quarters from this part of the business?

Jason Kelly

We launched Ginkgo Datapoints, what was it, a year and a half ago now. To have, you know, 10 the top pharma companies as customers now is really exciting. I think the revenue unlock is just repeat business from those customers. We are starting to see that. What we saw was sort of like pilot project, data gen project, and then now you've got, again, because you are seeing people trying to build in-house models. Now remember, like these are not reasoning models. These are not like in-house versions of Claude or Codex or, you know, or, you know, Opus or whatever, or GPT 5.5. They are models trained on biological data, so they're much more specialized.

Jason Kelly

I do think it makes sense actually in the field that you're going to see a lot of people having their own datasets, their own models that are sort of tuned-up versions maybe of various protein models. That's not going to be uncommon at all. Much more common than I think you'll see in the reasoning model and coding space because these things are very different, and people have different datasets. I'm sort of hopeful as the people are building these models, we'll keep seeing this sort of repeat demand as they're like, "Okay, I found one. I like what I'm seeing in terms of return on data and performance of my internal model. Give me more data." That's the revenue unlock. The more of that we see, I think we become sort of like a default provider.

Jason Kelly

That's certainly what happened with Scale AI and other places in the early days of image models and then language models. When people saw, "Oh, I'm seeing performance increase with more data," they turned around and bought more data. That's what we're going to be watching as these protein models and it does not just protein, other types of models come out too in the future. I think that's the lane for Ginkgo Datapoints.

Daniel Marshall

Sort of on the theme of AI, there was someone who was on X who asked us a question. I think this is sort of based on our project with OpenAI. How much efficiency improvements after using GPT 5.5? Any idea for space left for improvement? Will this be a transitional factor?

Jason Kelly

We did this project, just to remind, that we announced back in February with OpenAI as our first project with them, where we had GPT. It was actually not 5.5, it was 5, 'cause we started much earlier, and that was when that was the model that was out, and we kinda kept the same model through the whole thing for, like, more scientific paper purposes. We were able to show over a series of 6 rounds of running the model with 100 384-well plates designed by GPT 5 per round, a 40% improvement over state-of-the-art in the scientific goal we were trying to achieve. I think there's real interesting questions. A. How much further could you push that?

Jason Kelly

Like sort of, you know, what does actually diminishing re-returns look like in some of these scientific areas? Can the model have sort of breakthrough ideas that create really new ways of doing this TBD? As the models have gotten better-Yeah, would 5.5 be better than what we got with 5, right? I think that's all gonna be exciting stuff to test. We're excited to do more with OpenAI, and we're planning to. I think this is open terrain in terms of how good the reasoning models can be at basically experimental design and experimental analysis. Those are the two things it's really doing. It's like, "Here's an experiment I wanna run. Give me back the data, Cloud Lab, you know, autonomous lab.

Jason Kelly

Give me back what are the results of my experiments I just designed, and then I'm gonna analyze them and design more experiments." We'll see. You know, I think that's real exciting to watch what it's gonna be capable of there. It's a new way to do science. It really is. Like, I won't belabor this too much, the access to a model like that plus an autonomous lab can let individual scientists operate closer to how a principal investigator of an academic lab or a head of a drug discovery group who has a lab of 8 people or a lab of, you know, 30 people and is sort of assigning hypotheses to different people and kind of pursuing that over time.

Jason Kelly

An individual could push that out for probably close to the same cost as they're currently costing to be themselves at a lab bench, in terms of their utility costs and everything else, and utilization, low utilization of equipment. They could push out 5 agents on top of an autonomous lab to go pursue a bunch of experiments. That is real exciting if that works. I think it really fundamentally changes the rate we can do science. That's why you see the Genesis Mission in the U.S. investing in this sort of stuff because their goal is to 2X the output of U.S. science. These are the ways that that'll do it. Our science-based industries, of which pharma's the biggest, will be completely changed by this. If you can two or three times the rate, no question about it.

Daniel Marshall

Our next question is really a bundle of questions from DK who's writing from South Korea. These questions are all about how the move onto Nebula, our autonomous lab, has sort of changed the science that we're doing. The questions are, how does the use of Ginkgo's automated lab affect overall costs? Are there meaningful differences in speed, for example, turnaround time for experiments? Have you observed improvements in success rates, reproducibility, or scalability since moving to the autonomous lab?

Jason Kelly

Yeah. On cost, I tried to touch on this a little bit in the talk, but I think, like, the clear ROI, not just for us, but for any one of our customers looking at an autonomous lab, is about a threefold reduction in space utilization compared to a manual lab and a four-fold increase in the time. In other words, like, the amount of time the lab is being used to do lab work, right? From that 40 hours to 168, 24/7 week. That's really those improvements is where it's gonna yield the cost reduction. That is a huge amount, like, 'cause those are really the two, like, sort of people time and space time are the two big things we spend money on in research. On the speed front, yeah, it's interesting.

Jason Kelly

An individual protocol doesn't really get shorter, like, than necessarily you would do it at the bench. You can imagine ways to do that in the future, rebuild protocols differently. The first thing scientists are gonna do is just take work they're doing at the bench and move it onto the autonomous lab. In that world, it does not need to get faster in terms of, like, end-to-end time for the protocol. However, it, in practice, can get faster 'cause you can start a protocol at 4:00 P.M. in the afternoon where you never would have planned to spend the next seven hours in the lab, kick it off, and have the thing run overnight.

Jason Kelly

In that world, you took an experiment that you would've started tomorrow at 10:00 A.M. and start it at 4:00 P.M. and have the results by tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. or 10:00 A.M. That can shave a whole day off. I think you will see actually a massive speed up because scientists will start taking advantage of the 4x more time that they have available every week. If they plan it right, you know, in theory, you could see a 4-fold improvement in a lot of the times, depending on how serialized your experiments need to be. I think that's really exciting, and our scientists at Ginkgo really like that. On the just sort of, like, improvement and, like, I would say, I would call this, like, the quality of the experiments.

Jason Kelly

I think reproducibility is inherently advantaged on automation, and that's mainly to do with, like, the audit trail. Like, you kinda. If an instrument errors, if a liquid handler makes a mistake, you know, like, These are all tracked. You kinda know, like, those experiments that you don't catch at the manual lab bench, you catch if there's such a mistake on the autonomous lab. If you saw a really, wow, that's a surprising result, you might go back, look at your experiment, and say like, "Oh, oops, I see what I did there. I, like, designed this experiment in a way that was, like, a little silly, and that's actually what's giving me this result." As opposed to assuming you did the experiment you wanted to do and that was the origin of this, like, amazing result you got.

Jason Kelly

That's a common thing that can happen for no nefarious reasons for scientists at the bench. I think that you will see a big improvement in reproducibility. The other thing that got brought up there was throughput. Yeah, the throughput increase is gonna be insane. I think people are surprised when they go to cloud.ginkgo.bio, which I encourage people to do, and type in a protocol and see how much it costs. 'Cause I'm basically pricing that protocol based on reagent use and equipment time and a markup on that, and it is not the insane cost that you have when you have a whole team doing this work at the bench. It's just not.

Jason Kelly

Like if scientists really understood just how low-cost each sample could be in an experiment, in order to do many more, they just hit a button rather than have to slave in the lab for 3 days doing 1,000 experiments, they're gonna just order 1,000 experiments. I think you will see an explosion in the amount of data, and this is 100% what happened in every other field that's ever been automated. Right? It's like the beginnings of the automation of computation, right? Like when we went from slide rules to automated computation, an explosion in the amount of compute you use and a massive increase in the ROI from what people who understood how to design computation could do.

Jason Kelly

That's what I want to do for the scientists, for the drug discovery leads when they have access to an autonomous lab compared to the ROI and the throughput that they can get out of manual labs. It's just going to be no comparison. Yeah, I think all three you're going to see big gains on. The cool thing is we're going to keep showing this on Nebula. We, you know, just had a, again, head of R&D through today, and we went through with his team and showed all the gains and it's, yeah, it's real exciting right now.

Daniel Marshall

I think we'll end on a note kind of related to that, which is, you guys mentioned in the call, you've mentioned other places, that you're trying to get to 100 RACs. When do you actually expect to get there?

Jason Kelly

It's been pretty fun. We're here to put some behind the scene videos up. We have been installing racks for the last 3 weeks here at Ginkgo. They just showed up on trucks, built by our team in Emeryville. We just added the additional 50. They are all fully connected now, and the lab just took a tour of it. It's insane. We can run them now, like the original system is running, and now the new 50 is running, and there is a connection between the 2, and that connection is gonna get turned on, I think, on the 14th. I don't know. Next week. It is imminent. Really excited to see it all come together, but we already have it up now running as 2 separate loops.

Jason Kelly

To put in 50 new pieces of equipment in 3 weeks, again, these are just things that no one's ever done in laboratory automation. I do think we are doing a very unique thing here at Ginkgo. That's the bet. That's certainly what I'm leaning in on the company. It's what we're investing our capital into. It's where our new customers are coming from. If you like that idea, I think now is a really exciting time to get involved with the company in any way. Yes, we're gonna be at 100 next week. 103 or 5. I gotta count 'em up.

Daniel Marshall

Thanks. All right, if you wanna follow us on that journey, you can go to X or LinkedIn, Instagram and keep watching. We'll have a lot of content coming about the unveiling of the new full system. As always, if you have questions, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. Thanks so much, everyone. Until next time.

Jason Kelly

Thanks, everybody.

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-06

Earnings To Watch: Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (DNA) Reports Q1 2026 Result

GuruFocus.com

This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is set to release its Q1 2026 earnings on May 7, 2026. The consensus estimate for Q1 2026 revenue is $41.52 million, and the earnings are expected to come in at -$1.09 per share. The full year 2026's revenue is expected to be $160.08 million and the earnings are expected to be -$3.63 per share. More detailed estimate data can be found on the Forecast page. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 5 Warning Signs with DNA. Is DNA fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Revenue estimates for Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) have declined from $185.72 million to $160.08 million for the full year 2026 and from $241.70 million to $157.95 million for 2027 over the past 90 days. Earnings estimates have increased from -$3.98 per share to -$3.63 per share for the full year 2026 and remained flat at -$3.95 per share for 2027 over the past 90 days. In the previous quarter ending on December 31, 2025, Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc's (NYSE:DNA) actual revenue was $33.40 million, which missed analysts' revenue expectations of $37.62 million by -11.22%. The actual earnings were -$1.41 per share, which missed analysts' earnings expectations of -$1.36 per share by -3.68%. After releasing the results, Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) was down by -30.48% in one day. Based on the one-year price targets offered by three analysts, the average target price for Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is $10.00 with a high estimate of $12.00 and a low estimate of $9.00. The average target implies an upside of 3.72% from the current price of $9.64. Based on GuruFocus estimates, the estimated GF Value for Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) in one year is $8.74, suggesting a downside of -9.35% from the current price of $9.64. Based on the consensus recommendation from four brokerage firms, Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc's (NYSE:DNA) average brokerage recommendation is currently 4.0, indicating an "Underperform" status. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 5, where 1 signifies Strong Buy, and 5 denotes Sell.

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-04-30

Ginkgo Bioworks Announces Date of First Quarter 2026 Results Presentation

PR Newswire

Presentation and Q&A session scheduled for post-market on Thursday, May 7, 2026 BOSTON, April 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DNA, "Ginkgo") today announced that it plans to host a presentation and Q&A session reviewing business performance for the first quarter ended March 31, 2026, on Thursday, May 7, 2026, beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET. The presentation details and webcast link will be available on Ginkgo's investor relations website at https://investors.ginkgobioworks.com, and a replay will be made available. To ask a question ahead of the presentation, please submit them to @Ginkgo on X (hashtag #GinkgoResults) or by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. About Ginkgo Bioworks Ginkgo Bioworks builds the tools that make biology easier to engineer for everyone. The company offers autonomous laboratories that replace manual laboratory work with robotics in the lab, greatly improving the productivity of scientists. Ginkgo's in-house autonomous lab is also available as a "cloud lab" through our Datapoints and Solutions contract research services. For more information, visit ginkgobioworks.com and ginkgobiosecurity.com, read our blog, or follow us on social media channels such as X (@Ginkgo and @Ginkgo_Biosec), Instagram (@GinkgoBioworks), Threads (@GinkgoBioworks), or LinkedIn. Ginkgo Bioworks Contacts: INVESTOR CONTACT: [email protected] MEDIA CONTACT: [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ginkgo-bioworks-announces-date-of-first-quarter-2026-results-presentation-302757632.html

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-03-01

A Look At Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA) Valuation After Earnings Update And Invaio Collaboration

Simply Wall St.
Make better investment decisions with Simply Wall St's easy, visual tools that give you a competitive edge. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings (DNA) has drawn fresh attention after reporting full year 2025 results that paired lower sales with a smaller net loss, alongside a new collaboration with Invaio Sciences on peptide based crop protection. See our latest analysis for Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings. The earnings release and Invaio collaboration have landed against a tough backdrop, with Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings’ 1 day share price return of 30.48% decline at US$6.75 adding to a 22.41% share price decline year to date and an 87.86% three year total shareholder return decline. Together, these moves signal that recent momentum has been weak despite growing interest in the company’s platform and partnerships. If this biotech news has you thinking more broadly about where AI meets real world applications, it could be worth scanning 61 profitable AI stocks that aren't just burning cash as a starting list of cash generating names to research next. With revenue of US$170.16 million, a net loss of US$312.76 million and a share price that has dropped 87.86% over three years, investors may now be asking whether Ginkgo Bioworks is undervalued or whether the market is already pricing in any future growth. With Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings closing at $6.75 against a most followed fair value estimate of $10, the current share price sits well below that narrative anchor, which is built on detailed assumptions around future margins, revenue paths and discount rates. Read the complete narrative. Curious what kind of revenue path and margin reset would support that higher fair value, especially with forecasts calling for shrinking top line and ongoing losses. The full narrative lays out how earnings, share count and a premium future earnings multiple need to work together to bridge the gap between today’s price and that $10 anchor. Result: Fair Value of $10 (UNDERVALUED) Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what's behind the forecasts. However, you still need to weigh risks, such as slower adoption of Ginkgo’s AI and automation tools, as well as ongoing margin pressure from underused lab capacity. Find out about the key risks to this Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings narrative. If this mix of pressure and potential leaves you on the fence, take a moment to review the full picture for yo…Read full document

Make better investment decisions with Simply Wall St's easy, visual tools that give you a competitive edge. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings (DNA) has drawn fresh attention after reporting full year 2025 results that paired lower sales with a smaller net loss, alongside a new collaboration with Invaio Sciences on peptide based crop protection. See our latest analysis for Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings. The earnings release and Invaio collaboration have landed against a tough backdrop, with Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings’ 1 day share price return of 30.48% decline at US$6.75 adding to a 22.41% share price decline year to date and an 87.86% three year total shareholder return decline. Together, these moves signal that recent momentum has been weak despite growing interest in the company’s platform and partnerships. If this biotech news has you thinking more broadly about where AI meets real world applications, it could be worth scanning 61 profitable AI stocks that aren't just burning cash as a starting list of cash generating names to research next. With revenue of US$170.16 million, a net loss of US$312.76 million and a share price that has dropped 87.86% over three years, investors may now be asking whether Ginkgo Bioworks is undervalued or whether the market is already pricing in any future growth. With Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings closing at $6.75 against a most followed fair value estimate of $10, the current share price sits well below that narrative anchor, which is built on detailed assumptions around future margins, revenue paths and discount rates. Read the complete narrative. Curious what kind of revenue path and margin reset would support that higher fair value, especially with forecasts calling for shrinking top line and ongoing losses. The full narrative lays out how earnings, share count and a premium future earnings multiple need to work together to bridge the gap between today’s price and that $10 anchor. Result: Fair Value of $10 (UNDERVALUED) Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what's behind the forecasts. However, you still need to weigh risks, such as slower adoption of Ginkgo’s AI and automation tools, as well as ongoing margin pressure from underused lab capacity. Find out about the key risks to this Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings narrative. If this mix of pressure and potential leaves you on the fence, take a moment to review the full picture for yourself with 2 key rewards and 2 important warning signs. If Ginkgo has sparked fresh questions about where to put your money to work, do not stop here. Broaden your watchlist with a few focused stock ideas. Target value by reviewing 46 high quality undervalued stocks that combine strong fundamentals with prices that sit below many investors’ radar. Prioritise resilience by scanning 74 resilient stocks with low risk scores that score well on stability and lower risk profiles. Hunt for early stage potential by checking our 30 elite penny stocks with strong financials that pair smaller market caps with stronger financials than many peers. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include DNA. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email [email protected]

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-28

Ginkgo Bioworks Q4 Earnings Call Highlights

MarketBeat
Autonomous labs become Ginkgo’s core 2026 strategy: the company will concentrate capital there, systematically move work from traditional benches onto its Nebula system in Boston, expand rack capacity toward 100 racks, and commercialize offerings including Solutions, Datapoints and a cloud lab service while integrating AI (e.g., GPT‑5) into "lab in a loop" experiments. Biosecurity divestiture planned to redirect capital: Ginkgo will spin off and take its biosecurity business private with outside investors while retaining a minority stake, allowing the company to "share in the upside" but free cash for autonomous‑lab investments. Financials and 2026 guidance: cell engineering revenue declined (Q4 down 26% y/y; full‑year $133M vs $174M in 2024) but R&D and G&A cuts substantially improved losses and Adjusted EBITDA, cash burn fell to $171M for 2025 (Q4 $47M), and management is guiding only on cash burn of $125–$150M for 2026 rather than revenue. Interested in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) used its fourth-quarter earnings call to outline a sharpened strategic focus for 2026 centered on “autonomous labs,” while also detailing year-over-year declines in cell engineering revenue and continued progress on expense reductions and cash burn. Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company views 2025’s fourth quarter as a “breakout quarter” in defining and leading the category of autonomous labs. He described 2026 as a year focused on “investing to win” in autonomous labs, which he framed as part of a broader movement combining robotics, AI, and autonomy. → Diamondback Sees Resilient Demand Despite Cautious Guidance Kelly laid out three priorities for 2026: Concentrate investment on autonomous labs, including capital allocation changes enabled by a planned biosecurity divestiture. Demonstrate capabilities in Boston by “systematically decommissioning” traditional lab benches, walk-up automation, and work cells and moving more work onto a “single large autonomous lab” controlled by software. Book additional autonomous lab sales beyond the company’s Department of Energy-related project work, targeting national labs, biopharma, and research universities. Kelly spent part of his remarks explaining the company’s plan to divest its biosecurity business, which he said grew out of work begun during COVID. He highl…Read full document

Autonomous labs become Ginkgo’s core 2026 strategy: the company will concentrate capital there, systematically move work from traditional benches onto its Nebula system in Boston, expand rack capacity toward 100 racks, and commercialize offerings including Solutions, Datapoints and a cloud lab service while integrating AI (e.g., GPT‑5) into "lab in a loop" experiments. Biosecurity divestiture planned to redirect capital: Ginkgo will spin off and take its biosecurity business private with outside investors while retaining a minority stake, allowing the company to "share in the upside" but free cash for autonomous‑lab investments. Financials and 2026 guidance: cell engineering revenue declined (Q4 down 26% y/y; full‑year $133M vs $174M in 2024) but R&D and G&A cuts substantially improved losses and Adjusted EBITDA, cash burn fell to $171M for 2025 (Q4 $47M), and management is guiding only on cash burn of $125–$150M for 2026 rather than revenue. Interested in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) used its fourth-quarter earnings call to outline a sharpened strategic focus for 2026 centered on “autonomous labs,” while also detailing year-over-year declines in cell engineering revenue and continued progress on expense reductions and cash burn. Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company views 2025’s fourth quarter as a “breakout quarter” in defining and leading the category of autonomous labs. He described 2026 as a year focused on “investing to win” in autonomous labs, which he framed as part of a broader movement combining robotics, AI, and autonomy. → Diamondback Sees Resilient Demand Despite Cautious Guidance Kelly laid out three priorities for 2026: Concentrate investment on autonomous labs, including capital allocation changes enabled by a planned biosecurity divestiture. Demonstrate capabilities in Boston by “systematically decommissioning” traditional lab benches, walk-up automation, and work cells and moving more work onto a “single large autonomous lab” controlled by software. Book additional autonomous lab sales beyond the company’s Department of Energy-related project work, targeting national labs, biopharma, and research universities. Kelly spent part of his remarks explaining the company’s plan to divest its biosecurity business, which he said grew out of work begun during COVID. He highlighted the company’s monitoring efforts—distinct from diagnostic testing—including initiatives that helped reopen “5,000 schools nationwide,” as well as ongoing monitoring work at airports in partnership with the CDC, including wastewater testing from planes and related programs in other locations such as Doha, Qatar. → AI Is Separating Software Winners From Losers, 2 Experts Explain Kelly said interest in the defense technology sector has expanded in recent years and that Ginkgo received inbound interest from “pure play investors” who want to build next-generation biodefense companies. Under the planned divestiture approach, Kelly said Ginkgo would spin off the biosecurity business, take it private, and bring in outside investment, while Ginkgo retains a minority stake. He characterized the move as a way for Ginkgo to “share in the upside” of biosecurity while focusing its cash resources on autonomous labs. CFO Steve Coen provided an update on fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, including segment revenue, expenses, and Adjusted EBITDA. → NVIDIA’s AI Boom Isn’t Slowing After Blowout Q4 Cell engineering revenue was $26 million in Q4 2025, down 26% from Q4 2024. Coen said the company supported 109 revenue-generating programs during the quarter, down 4% year over year, which he attributed primarily to “ongoing program rationalization” tied to restructuring activities. For the full year 2025, cell engineering revenue was $133 million, compared with $174 million in 2024. Coen also pointed to revenue items tied to the release of deferred revenue following mutual terminations of prior agreements: Q1 2025 included $7.5 million of non-cash revenue related to termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Q3 2024 included $45 million of non-cash revenue related to termination of the Motif FoodWorks agreement. Excluding those impacts, Coen said cell engineering revenue was $125 million in 2025 and $129 million in 2024, with the decrease driven primarily by restructuring-related customer program rationalization. Biosecurity revenue was $7 million in Q4 2025 and $37 million for the full year 2025. On expenses, Coen said cell engineering R&D expense fell 44% to $28 million in Q4 2025 from $50 million a year earlier. For the full year, cell engineering R&D expense decreased 42% to $159 million from $272 million. Coen also discussed a prior cloud and AI partnership commitment with Google Cloud. He said full-year 2025 R&D included a $21 million shortfall obligation. In October 2025, the company “amended and reset” annual commitments and settled the shortfall obligation for $14 million. Coen said the reset reduced future minimum commitments by “more than $100 million” compared to original terms and extended the commitment term from three to six years. Cell engineering G&A expense decreased 40% to $12 million in Q4 2025 from $20 million in Q4 2024. For the full year, G&A expense fell 51% to $56 million from $115 million, which Coen attributed to restructuring efforts. Cell engineering segment operating loss improved to $17 million in Q4 2025 from $38 million a year earlier. For the full year 2025, the segment operating loss was $96 million versus $219 million in 2024, which Coen again tied directly to restructuring actions, with some impact from the previously mentioned items. Coen said biosecurity segment operating loss improved 60% in Q4 2025 compared to Q4 2024 and improved 38% for the full year 2025 compared to 2024. Total Adjusted EBITDA was -$36 million in Q4 2025 versus -$57 million in Q4 2024. For the full year 2025, total Adjusted EBITDA was -$167 million compared with -$293 million in 2024. Coen also noted carrying costs related to excess leased space, describing it as base rent and other charges for space the company is not occupying, net of sublease income. He said the carrying cost was $4 million in 2025 and $15 million in Q4. On liquidity and spending, Coen reported cash burn of $47 million in Q4 2025, down from $55 million in Q4 2024, and full-year 2025 cash burn of $171 million, down from $383 million in 2024. Kelly added that the company reduced annual cash burn by 55% from fiscal 2024 to 2025, and said Ginkgo ended the year with $430 million on its books. For 2026, Coen said the company will not provide revenue guidance and will instead guide on cash burn, which management said better reflects ongoing services and planned investments in autonomous labs. Coen guided to overall 2026 cash burn of $125 million to $150 million, describing the range as balancing cost efficiency, continued services, and investments including the “build-out of our frontier autonomous lab in Boston.” Kelly reinforced that decision, saying the company wants investor focus on how cash is being deployed as it invests “very deliberately” in autonomous labs, and said he wants internal teams focused on shifting work from traditional laboratory setups to the autonomous lab rather than targeting short-term service revenue. Kelly highlighted several developments tied to autonomous labs: OpenAI project: Kelly said Ginkgo connected GPT-5 to its autonomous lab in Boston, enabling iterative “lab in a loop” experiment design and execution. He said the collaboration improved state-of-the-art performance on a cell-free protein synthesis challenge by 40% after six rounds of experimentation. Department of Energy / PNNL: Kelly referenced a ribbon-cutting at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory tied to installation work under the Genesis project. He also cited a new $47 million DOE contract to build a “97-robot, 97-rack autonomous lab” at PNNL. SLAS conference tours: Kelly said Ginkgo hosted tours of its “Nebula” autonomous lab in Boston, now at more than 50 racks, and that 590 people attended. He said the company plans to expand from roughly 50 racks to 100 racks by the first half of the year. In the Q&A, Kelly said the rack expansion is intended to help move work from benches, walk-up automation, and work cells onto the Nebula system, supporting offerings including Solutions, Datapoints, and an upcoming cloud lab service. He said Solutions deals tend to be multi-year but are pursued project by project, while Datapoints is becoming more repeat-driven as customers build trust. He described the cloud lab concept as a forthcoming offering aimed at smaller orders—such as “$50” or “$200”—to let scientists try autonomous lab work before making larger commitments. Kelly also addressed a question about onshoring and manufacturing sites, saying Ginkgo has seen interest in applying its systems to manufacturing quality control protocols and is in discussions with some customers about deploying automation at manufacturing locations. On rack production scalability, he said the company made design changes over the past several years aimed at manufacturability, and that racks are made in San Jose with final assembly and integration in Emeryville, California, through a partner. While he said scaling manufacturing is not the company’s “immediate problem,” he indicated it is planning for potential future expansion through larger partners if demand increases. Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc is a synthetic biology company that designs custom microbes for customers across a range of industries. Utilizing a proprietary organism foundry platform, the company engineers cells to produce high-value chemicals, enzymes, and other biological materials. By integrating automation, data analytics and machine learning, Ginkgo Bioworks seeks to accelerate the development of biologically derived solutions at industrial scale. The company's services span the entire development cycle, from genetic design and strain optimization to fermentation and downstream processing. The article "Ginkgo Bioworks Q4 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat.

Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-28

Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (DNA) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Highlights: Strategic Shifts and ...

GuruFocus.com
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Cell Engineering Revenue (Q4 2025): $26 million, down 26% year-over-year. Cell Engineering Revenue (Full Year 2025): $133 million, compared to $174 million in 2024. Biosecurity Revenue (Q4 2025): $7 million. Biosecurity Revenue (Full Year 2025): $37 million. Cell Engineering R&D Expense (Q4 2025): $28 million, decreased 44% from Q4 2024. Cell Engineering R&D Expense (Full Year 2025): $159 million, decreased 42% from 2024. Cell Engineering G&A Expense (Q4 2025): $12 million, decreased 40% from Q4 2024. Cell Engineering G&A Expense (Full Year 2025): $56 million, decreased 51% from 2024. Cell Engineering Segment Operating Loss (Q4 2025): $17 million, improved from a loss of $38 million in Q4 2024. Cell Engineering Segment Operating Loss (Full Year 2025): $96 million, improved from a loss of $219 million in 2024. Total Adjusted EBITDA (Q4 2025): $36 million, down from $57 million in Q4 2024. Total Adjusted EBITDA (Full Year 2025): $167 million, down from $293 million in 2024. Cash Burn (Q4 2025): $47 million, decreased 15% from Q4 2024. Cash Burn (Full Year 2025): $171 million, decreased 55% from 2024. Cash Position (End of 2025): $430 million. 2026 Cash Burn Guidance: Expected to be in the range of $125 to $150 million. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 6 Warning Signs with DNA. Is DNA fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Release Date: February 26, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is focusing on autonomous labs, which are expected to transform biotechnology by integrating robotics and AI. The company plans to divest its biosecurity business to focus investments on autonomous labs, allowing for more targeted growth. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) has significantly reduced its cash burn by 55% in 2025, setting a strong financial foundation for future investments. The company secured a $47 million deal with Pacific Northwest National Labs, showcasing interest from federal entities in autonomous labs. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is expanding its autonomous lab capacity in Boston, aiming to demonstrate the viability of replacing traditional labs with automated systems. Cell engineering revenue decreased by 26% in Q4 2025 compared to Q4 2024, indicating challenges in main…Read full document

This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Cell Engineering Revenue (Q4 2025): $26 million, down 26% year-over-year. Cell Engineering Revenue (Full Year 2025): $133 million, compared to $174 million in 2024. Biosecurity Revenue (Q4 2025): $7 million. Biosecurity Revenue (Full Year 2025): $37 million. Cell Engineering R&D Expense (Q4 2025): $28 million, decreased 44% from Q4 2024. Cell Engineering R&D Expense (Full Year 2025): $159 million, decreased 42% from 2024. Cell Engineering G&A Expense (Q4 2025): $12 million, decreased 40% from Q4 2024. Cell Engineering G&A Expense (Full Year 2025): $56 million, decreased 51% from 2024. Cell Engineering Segment Operating Loss (Q4 2025): $17 million, improved from a loss of $38 million in Q4 2024. Cell Engineering Segment Operating Loss (Full Year 2025): $96 million, improved from a loss of $219 million in 2024. Total Adjusted EBITDA (Q4 2025): $36 million, down from $57 million in Q4 2024. Total Adjusted EBITDA (Full Year 2025): $167 million, down from $293 million in 2024. Cash Burn (Q4 2025): $47 million, decreased 15% from Q4 2024. Cash Burn (Full Year 2025): $171 million, decreased 55% from 2024. Cash Position (End of 2025): $430 million. 2026 Cash Burn Guidance: Expected to be in the range of $125 to $150 million. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 6 Warning Signs with DNA. Is DNA fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Release Date: February 26, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is focusing on autonomous labs, which are expected to transform biotechnology by integrating robotics and AI. The company plans to divest its biosecurity business to focus investments on autonomous labs, allowing for more targeted growth. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) has significantly reduced its cash burn by 55% in 2025, setting a strong financial foundation for future investments. The company secured a $47 million deal with Pacific Northwest National Labs, showcasing interest from federal entities in autonomous labs. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is expanding its autonomous lab capacity in Boston, aiming to demonstrate the viability of replacing traditional labs with automated systems. Cell engineering revenue decreased by 26% in Q4 2025 compared to Q4 2024, indicating challenges in maintaining growth in this segment. The company is not providing revenue guidance for 2026, focusing instead on cash burn, which may concern investors looking for revenue growth indicators. Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc (NYSE:DNA) is undergoing restructuring, which has led to a decrease in the number of revenue-generating programs. The biosecurity business, despite being a decent-sized operation, is being spun off, which could lead to a loss of revenue from this segment. Adjusted EBITDA decreased from $57 million in Q4 2024 to $36 million in Q4 2025, reflecting the impact of restructuring and reduced revenues. Q: With the planned expansion of rack's capacity from roughly 50 to 100 units at the Boston facility, how is this expected to impact 2026 revenue, particularly in terms of recurring versus project-based services? A: Jason Kelly, CEO, explained that the rack expansion aims to shift all lab work onto the 100-rack system, enabling services like data point service, upcoming cloud lab service, and solution service. Solutions deals are typically multi-year, providing some repeatability, while data points are becoming more repeat business as trust builds with partners. The cloud lab service is a new experiment targeting smaller batch work, which could also lead to repeat business. Q: How should we think about US onshoring of manufacturing as a potential tailwind to rack's revenue growth, and what will Ginkgo need to do to maximize its share of this trend? A: Jason Kelly noted interest in using racks for manufacturing quality control (QC). The racks' strength lies in handling complex, multi-step protocols, which could be beneficial for QC in manufacturing plants. Ginkgo is in discussions with customers about deploying automation in manufacturing sites, potentially benefiting from onshoring trends. Q: How is Ginkgo's data points offering being received among customers, and are there any material tailwinds expected for this part of the business over the next 12 months? A: Jason Kelly stated that the data points offering is well-received, particularly as bioAI models gain traction. The need for large data sets to train these models is driving demand. Ginkgo is positioned as a leader in providing data sets to large pharma and biotech ML teams, which is expected to continue growing. Q: Is Ginkgo exploring strategies to enhance the production efficiency and scalability of racks, similar to Tesla's use of the Giga press? A: Jason Kelly mentioned that Ginkgo has made design changes to the racks for manufacturability, reducing components and improving scalability. While current manufacturing processes can scale decently, Ginkgo plans to invest in larger partners for manufacturing as demand grows. Q: What are the key benefits for customers using Ginkgo's autonomous labs, and how does Ginkgo plan to commercialize these labs? A: Jason Kelly highlighted three benefits: reducing overhead costs by closing traditional labs, increasing research productivity, and enabling AI-driven lab-in-a-loop experiments. Ginkgo plans to commercialize by placing systems at customer sites and offering cloud lab services, targeting the large research spending currently funneled through traditional lab benches. For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.

As of 2026-08-15 • Updated weeklySource: Earnings sourceIngestion runbook